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The argument that priority attention should be given to persons most affected by the process of development could, however, under certain conditions, be used in favour of social measures for the population outside the wage-earning category. Should, for some reason, the rural sector become the central pillar of the development process, it could be envisaged that a country might adopt a social security policy giving priority attention to the rural sector, for people living there would be those most affected by the development process. Alternatively, a country may decide to give priority attention to social protection measures of what has been described as the "geographically and occupationally mcbile 'marginal' population strata with increasingly insecure relationships to the national systems cf production, consumption and political participation".1 This again would be a question of political choice, with economic constraints imposing some obvious and very drastic limits on the means of intervention. By definition, measures in favour cf people living on the margin of the money economy could only take the form of social services, some of which would probably go beyond the scope of what is normally understood under social security measures. While the supply of medical care comes under the classical definition of social security, the satisfaction of other basic needs, e.g. with respect to the regular supply of food or the provision of housing2, would clearly constitute a new dimension of the concept, not from the functional but from the structural point of view. It is obvious that any such measures would have to be based on a careful survey of living conditions and needs of these populations and on an entirely new and original approach to the problem of social services. 3 Needless to say, a complete functional unity would have to be ensured, both at the planning and operational stages, as between social services administered by social security institutions and other public bodies but, once again, hope may be expressed that, in the developing countries, with many sccial structures in the process of formation, this task should be easier than in the industrialised countries.
2.
The economic versus the social
objectives of social security planning
We have argued in the previous chapter of this paper that development planning cannot be based on the assessment of one aspect of development only, no matter how tempting it may be to reduce the operations of complex social processes to one factor which happens to have the advantage of being easily quantifiable; the fact that certain aspects of development are difficult to measure does not necessarily mean that they are unimportant and should be left out of the plan. It may well be that society, like a plant, needs several basic elements or conditions for full development and if one of these elements is missing the plant will not flourish.
"Social
1 See Marshall Wolfe:
Security and Development: The Latin American Experience", in E.M. Kassalow, ed.: The Role of Social Security in Economic Development, Washington, US Social Security Administration, 1968, p. 168.
2 Cf. L. Musiga: "Problems of Social Protection in Kenya", to be published in the International Social Security Review
Review in 1974. The author indicates that a field survey reveals that the order of priorities for this population
is: food, health and housing.
man,
3 This view is being increasingly held in the international circles dealing with this problem. Thus, for instance, in a draft of an article on "Unified Approach to Development Analysis and Planning" to be published by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development in Geneva, in "Research Notes No. 4", the following text can be found: "A basic problem of the unified approach is how to provide some form of security to compensate for the insecurities of nature, or sometimes of to which the low-income population of developing countries are especially exposed Social Security systems of a type found in industrialised ccuntries do not transfer to this kind of situation
Regional, national and international focd banks and food relief schemes, or relief schemes for other catastrophes, are a partial answer, dealing with some of the most urgent needs. But catastrophic losses of income ог property, to which large numbers of poor people are periodically subjected and which are beyond the capacity of the local community ОГ the traditional society to deal with, are not commonly met by relief schemes, and satisfactory local stockpiling and saving schemes to date have not been widely
realised."
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