A/HRC/5/3 page 6 3 domination and exclusion”. It further stated that, “Absolute poverty is a condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends not only on income but also access to social services.”4 This characterization of poverty was reiterated in several international conferences such as the World Food Summit in Rome in 1966, the United Nations Millennium Declaration of 2000 and the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002. 8. In line with this approach, the independent expert defined poverty, as a composite of income poverty, human development poverty and social exclusion, and extreme poverty, as the extreme form of these three different dimensions of poverty. People who suffer from income poverty are those who have a dispensable income or expenditure below an agreed level that can be considered to be the minimum required for leading a sustainable life.5 People suffering from human development poverty were regarded as those who lacked access to those certain basic goods and services that make it possible to lead a meaningful life. As it may not be possible to capture all the aspects of human development, a few essential components of human development poverty, such as longevity, the availability and access to food and nutrition, basic education or shelters, of minimal standards, may be chosen by consensus in a society and on the basis of the availability of data and information. Social exclusion would refer to the basic security of the individual’s ability to lead an adequate social existence, depending on the characteristics of the society in which he lives and the structure of relationships. 9. It is recognized that these three dimensions of poverty are often interdependent but are not perfectly correlated to each other. They represent different aspects of the poverty phenomenon and would require different sets of policies to address them. A composite of these characteristics would imply a union of these three sets of poor people, those who are either income poor or human development poor or socially excluded, without overlaps, to avoid double counting. This would include, in addition to those people suffering from all three types of poverty, those who suffer from any of them. An alternative definition of poverty would be the intersection of these 3 World Summit for Social Development, 1995, Programme of Action, chap. 2, para. 19, available at: http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/wssd/agreements/poach2.htm. 4 5 Ibid. This method of measuring income poverty is known as “headcount ratio”, which is the proportion of people below the poverty line and is a simpler measure for which now data has been collected for most developing countries. But this is not necessarily the best measure of income poverty because, it does not capture the average shortfall of income of the poor from the poverty line nor the distribution of income among the poor. Both these notions may be necessary in order to devise a policy to solve the problems of the poorest in any anti-poor programme. Where data is available, these other indicators may be used in addition to the “headcount ratio”, to appropriately attack income poverty. However, we have chosen the usual headcount ratio as an indicator of income poverty, as a first approximation of this exercise. See A. Sen (1995) Inequality Re-examined, Oxford, pp. 102-116.