Sociologist Ramon Tejada Holguin writes today in El Caribe that government programs that seek to merely identify the poor do not address the real root of the problem. He says that so far government policy has been based on how people perceive poverty, inequality and exclusion. He said that neoliberal policies that give predominance to market forces in the scheme of things, and only perpetuate the asymmetries that exist, while assuming that only those with access to economic resources will survive. He comments that international organizations find it sufficient to make inventories of the poor and define policies to provide relief to their suffering. He comments that this is not enough, and insists that the history of the inequal relation, identification of the social processes that lead to the structuring of these groups and the mechanisms that perpetuate and expand the social inequalities need to be observed. He explained that patronizing social policies that merely provide relief, leave untouched the machinery that produces and perpetuates poverty. “Better social policy should seek to combat the machinery that makes people poor, and we lack that at present,” he concludes.