UN: Despite improvements, rural poverty remains a global scourge

Dec 6, 2010, 14:58 GMT

Rome - Over the past decade, 350 million rural people have moved out of 'extreme poverty,' but 70 per cent of the developing world's 1.4 billion extremely poor people still live in rural areas, a United Nations report said Monday.

Despite improvements 'global poverty remains a massive and predominantly rural phenomenon,' said the Rome-based UN International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in its report.

Since 2000, the overall rate of extreme poverty in rural areas of developing countries - people living on less than 1.25 US dollars a day - has dropped from 48 per cent to 34 per cent according to IFAD's Rural Poverty Report 2011.

'Dramatic gains in East Asia, particularly China, account for much of the decline,' IFAD said.

The report points to an alarming increase in the numbers of extremely poor people in rural areas of Sub-Saharan Africa, although the percentage living on less than the equivalent of 1.25 dollars a day - at 62 per cent - has actually dropped slightly since IFAD last issued a Rural Poverty Report in 2001.

It also notes the persistence of rural poverty on the South Asian subcontinent, which is home to half of the world's 1 billion extremely poor rural people.

'Increasingly volatile food prices, the uncertainties and effects of climate change, and a range of natural resource constraints will complicate further efforts to reduce rural poverty,' the report said.

But the report also emphasizes that profound changes in agricultural markets are giving rise to new and promising opportunities for the developing world's smallholder farmers.

These can significantly boost their productivity, which will be necessary to ensure enough food for an increasingly urbanized global population estimated to reach at least 9 billion by 2050, IFAD said.

However, 'there remains an urgent need to invest more and better in agriculture and rural areas' based on 'a new approach to smallholder agriculture that is both market-oriented and sustainable,' the report said.

Poor smallholder farmers and rural entrepreneurs should no longer be viewed as 'charity cases but as people whose innovation, dynamism and hard work will bring prosperity to their communities and greater food security to the world in the decades ahead,' IFAD President Kanayo Nwanze, said commenting on the report's findings.

The report also pointed to the key role of women farmers, who produce most of the food that is consumed locally in rural areas, and the need to address their inadequate access to land tenure, credit, equipment and market opportunities.

'Ongoing changes in agricultural markets, as well as emerging opportunities in the rural non-farm economy, offer new hope that major progress can be made in combating rural poverty,' IFAD said.

Changes include the rapid growth of urban centres and the accompanying rise in demand for higher value food, as well as the fact that agricultural markets are growing and becoming better organized in order to meet that demand.

'The food price shocks a few years ago were a wake up call that, with global population growth and the movement of more people into cities, higher and more uncertain food prices could become a fact of life,' Nwanze said.

'But this also means that smallholder agriculture - if it is productive, commercially oriented and well linked to modern markets - can offer the developing world's rural people a route out of poverty as they become part of the solution to global food security challenges,' he added.

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