Rural Poverty Report shows mixed results across regions, opportunities for progress in changing agricultural markets
Dubai About 70 per cent of the developing world's 1.4 billion extremely poor people are living in rural areas, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (Ifad) said in its latest report, a copy of which was obtained by Gulf News yesterday.
"Despite improvements over the past 10 years that have lifted more than 350 million rural people out of extreme poverty, global poverty remains a massive and predominantly rural phenomenon," the Ifad report said.
Ifad's Rural Poverty Report 2011 says that during the past decade the overall rate of extreme poverty in rural areas of developing countries — people living on less than $1.25 (Dh4.59) a day — has dropped from 48 per cent to 34 per cent. Dramatic gains in East Asia, particularly China, account for much of the decline.
Improvements in other regions, with the extreme rural poverty rate falling by more than half in Latin America and by nearly half in the Middle East and North Africa.
In both regions, the percentage of rural people who live in extreme poverty dropped significantly, as well.
Alarming increase
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 a day — at 62 per cent — has actually dropped slightly since Ifad's last report in 2001. It also notes the persistence of rural poverty on the South Asian subcontinent. Four-fifths of all extremely poor people in South Asia live in rural areas.
Sub-Saharan Africa is home to nearly a third of the world's extremely poor rural people, whose numbers swelled from 268 million to 306 million over the past decade.
Increasingly volatile food prices, the uncertainties and effects of climate change, and natural resource constraints will complicate further efforts to reduce rural poverty, the report says.
"The report makes clear that it is time to look at poor smallholder farmers and rural entrepreneurs in a completely new way — not 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," said Kanayo F. Nwanze, Ifad's president.
"We need to focus on creating an enabling environment for rural women and men to overcome the risks and challenges they face as they work to make their farms and other businesses successful," he said.
In addition to the overall decline of poverty in rural areas of developing countries, the report points to a drop in the overall poverty rate of $2 a day in rural areas, from 79 per cent to 61 per cent over the past decade.
But the report also said that profound changes in agricultural markets are giving rise to new opportunities for the developing world's smallholder farmers to boost their productivity, which will be necessary to ensure enough food for an increasingly urbanised global population expected to reach at least 9 billion by 2050.
