Poverty in the Pyrénées-Orientales (“We may be skint, but we know how to party!”) Part 1

Regular readers of this column will be aware how dependent the whole of the Languedoc-Roussillon region is on the growth of tourism for its economic survival. Not only is unemployment currently the highest in mainland France (c.11%), but also two of the region’s departments are amongst the poorest in the country. The poverty threshold is defined as a personal income of less than 788 euros a month (£552). 18% of the inhabitants of these two departments - the Aude and the Pyrénées-Orientales (P.O.) - live below this threshold whilst the national average is 11.7%. Of the country’s 95 departments, only three (Corsica, the Essonne, and Hauts de Seine) have a higher percentage of people living below this breadline. Furthermore, another measure (the annual median standard of living) shows the P.O. with an annual figure of 14.122 euros (£9,885) while nationally it is 15.766 euros (£11,036).

Before we look on the much brighter side of life hereabouts, here are a few further gloomy facts and figures for the department and region to which I have become so passionately attached. Child poverty in the whole of the Languedoc-Roussillon region stands at 24.8% (figures not being available for individual departments), ranking second only to the Nord-Pas-de-Calais (25.3%). Child poverty is defined as children up to the age of 17 living in homes where the household income is below the 788 euros poverty threshold.

All this is hardly surprising with some 15,475 people in the P.-O. (out of a total population of c.393,000) currently looking for work and reportedly surviving on RMI or income support (433 euros a month). These unfortunates include, of course, many of the vignerons and fruit farmers I have written about recently who have been and are still being thrown out of work and grubbing up their former livelihoods.

In Perpignan, a staggering 78% of its inhabitants are relieved partially or totally of their liabilities for “fiscalité communale”, i.e. rates and habitation taxes. Jean-Paul Alduy, the currently elected dynastic mayor, is often reviled, but has a very tough job on his hands, given the city’s problem of substandard housing inhabited by disadvantaged ethnic minorities. Though neither Alduy nor the President of the P.-O.’s Conseil Général, Christian Bourquin, can be forgiven for their ongoing, very public and destructive feud. Perhaps, only perhaps, this much-deplored catastrophe is an indicator that we all live on the same southerly latitudes as the Corsican Mafia? Once an enemy, always an enemy.


“The only economy left to us.”

Monsieur Paul Estienne, director of the Prades Tourist Office, was speaking from the heart recently when he declared that “Tourism is the only economy left to us.” In a typically passionate Catalan lament, he continued: “I am thinking of our children and grandchildren. The only legacy we are going to leave them is a Conflent that is bloodless and battered. [The Conflent is the Catalan district of which Prades is the capital, under the shadow of Mount Canigou.] 

There will be no future, no tourism, and a cultural heritage withering and collapsing due to general indifference. And if the Conflent dies, so also will our four summer events, most especially our festival in memory of Pablo Casals to whom the Conflent owes its identity. … My remarks are addressed to politicians and to others with similar responsibilities who are so often wrapped up in themselves.” Amen to that!

Part 2 to follow....

Sources:
www.insee.fr (Institut National des Statistiques et des Études Économiques – the French Office of National Statistics and Economic Studies)
Several editions of L’Indépendant, October/November 2007
***
© 2007 Basil Howitt