Poverty Trap - Burma

The concept of poverty trap is very relateable to the people of Burma and the rural family I have chosen for my World Food Prize research. As supported by my research, Poverty trap is very common in Burma and there are very little economic opportunities provided that allow families to dig themselves out. As a matter of fact, they face similar problems that Pak Solhin, an unemployed Indonesian immigrant, faced in which wages were so low that he was not able to afford enough food to give him the strength to work leading him to completely stop working.

When people are not only given very low wages but also very little varieties of food to sustain a healthy diet, then their productivity greatly decreases leading to poverty and eventually a trap. This trap can usually last for generations. An example of that is when uneducated parents who have low paying jobs remove their intelligent child from school because they saw the opportunity cost of the child going to school a lot less then if he could work and make money to support the family. Eventually when the child reaches his adult years, he will most likely face a similar problem and may deal with it in a similar way leading to a generational poverty trap.