Today’s current trend towards urbanisation has led many governments and donors to focus their poverty reduction work on the world’s new sprawling cities. It is true that cities are now home to a growing proportion of the world’s poorest people. But poverty is still far more prevalent in rural areas throughout the developing world.

Moreover, rural poverty promotes and exacerbates urban poverty by spurring mass migration to cities. So unless we make more concerted efforts to address rural poverty, we will not be able to reduce overall poverty and meet our international poverty reduction targets.

About 900 million poor people – or three-quarters of the world’s 1.2 billion poorest people – live in remote, rural areas and depend on agriculture for their survival. Ecologically fragile environments and natural disasters frequently work against poor farmers.

Discrimination can also impoverish. Large numbers of rural poor people are women and ethnic minorities. They are far from centres of power, often neglected by decision-makers, and they lack access to the kinds of resources and opportunities necessary for making a living.

As a result, an increasing number of rural people in Africa, many parts of the Middle East, Latin America and Asia are moving to cities in search of employment. In fact, rural-urban migration accounts for about 40% of today’s urban growth. But such migration is not fuelling economic growth in the developing world. Poverty is simply moving from rural areas to the cities.

Economic desperation and the hope of a better life is why cities have become magnets for people from economically depressed rural areas. But migrants often face dramatic declines in living standards in urban areas, especially in terms of nutrition and health. In fact, some urban migrants rely on food sent from rural relatives.

Rural development, therefore, must be the first step in fighting poverty – and an investment in agriculture is key. In most poor countries, agriculture is still the largest employer, job creator and export earner. Research has shown that for every dollar spent on agriculture, another two dollars is generated for a developing country’s national economy.

Furthermore, history has demonstrated that agricultural development can generate increased incomes, which leads to savings and investments, and finally to greater demand for goods and services. Look at Europe or the United States in the 19th century. Or Japan and the miracle economies in South-East Asia during the last century. Time and again, agriculture has been the engine that has driven economic growth.

At the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), we believe that the first priority in many poor countries needs to be increased food production. For the majority of rural poor people, staple food crops provide not only the bulk of their income, but also their diet. Seventy to 80% of the calories consumed by extremely poor people are staple foods.

However, as staple crop production becomes more efficient, land, labour and skills will become increasingly available for other pursuits, including cash crops and non-farm activities, like weaving or metal work. This transition from agriculture-based occupations to non-farm activities creates the basis for further diversification, which in turn creates more employment opportunities and boosts incomes.

But poor people in rural areas need secure access to vital resources, such as land, water and technology, before they can move beyond subsistence farming. They also need efficient and equitable access to markets. Financial services are increasingly important for poverty reduction. They not only give rural poor people the opportunity to save and borrow money but also contribute to their empowerment. And rural poor people must have strong organisations and real political representation to ensure their needs and interests are being met.

There are no short cuts or quick fixes to poverty reduction. But we can help stem the tide of people leaving rural areas unable to support them – and arriving in cities unprepared for them – by investing in agriculture. Unfortunately, the amount of official development assistance dedicated to agriculture has fallen by half since 1988. Today, only 8% of ODA goes to the rural sector.

This situation must be reversed before we can effectively address the material, institutional and policy constraints that perpetuate rural poverty, and reduce the number of people in the world living on less than one dollar a day. – Third World Network Features


About the writer: Atiqur Rahman is the lead strategist and policy coordinator for the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). IFAD is a specialised agency of the United Nations dedicated to combating rural poverty in the most disadvantaged regions of the world.

The above article first appeared in Habitat Debate (September 2004, Vol. 10 No. 3), published by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT).