KUALA LUMPUR, SEPT 24 — The federal government will need to adopt a higher poverty threshold in order to implement better policies to help the poor, the Parliamentary Caucus on Reform and Governance said today.

Its chairman Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim said the data provided to the caucus from various economists and research institute showed that incomes for various communities such as farmers, fishermen and others in the bottom 40 per cent (B40) have not increased proportionally to the country’s economic growth.

Instead, the gap between them and the top 20 per cent earners has increased, he said.

"The increase in the cost of living for the general public -- the income is more than the expense but for the lower income group B40 -- their income is now less than the expenses they have to spend,” he said during the Seminar on Economics, Poverty, and Gaps in Malaysia in Parliament.

In the current definition, Malaysia’s official Poverty Line Index (PLI) is a household monthly income of RM980 nationally, and a higher level of RM1,020 for Sarawak and RM1,180 for Sabah.

Officially, 24,700 households (or 0.4 per cent of total households) in Malaysia fall under this category.

Five states are defined as having zero poverty rates, while the others have less than 1 per cent of poor among the population. Only Sabah has a higher poverty rate of 2.8 per cent of its population.

This comes as United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Philip Alston on August 23 claimed that Malaysia’s actual rate of poverty is between 16 and 20 per cent, which is far off from the official figure.

Anwar also showed research by Khazanah Research Institute and Martin Ravalion which also put Malaysia’s poverty rate at between 20 and 22 per cent, which he said gave a better view of how the B40 group is struggling to survive.

"The sad thing is that because they can’t get the income they need, what happens is they spend less on food at home — the quality of food goes down.

"I remembered when I was in prison, the warden told me that his family spends on cheaper milk and diapers which upsets the baby’s health and quality of life as well,” he said.

After the seminar, which featured presentations by renowned economist Jomo Kwame Sundaram from University of Malaya’s Faculty of Economics and Rajah Rasiah from Asia-Europe Institute, Anwar once again promised that he will asked the government to review the problem.

"There is a need to implement a transcendent poverty policy that cuts across race and religion in the country.

"We will get the findings from academics, NGOs, experts and others in order to provide the best data to deal with the problem,” he said.

The seminar was also attended by MPs from across the party divide, senators, academics, NGOs as well as individuals who have been working on poverty-related issues in Malaysia.