JEDDAH, 13 June — Six years ago, world leaders meeting at the United Nations Social Summit in the Danish capital of Copenhagen agreed on a mechanism to reduce extreme poverty by half in 20 years. They resolved through the Declaration of the Millennium to bring down the number of poor by 50 percent by the year 2015. This is the proportion of the world poor whose income is less than one dollar a day and that of people who suffer from hunger.
Today, admits the head of the UN agency assigned the task of fighting rural poverty, progress has been well below what is required to achieve the goal of halving poverty. In South Asia and Latin America, the rate of poverty reduction was barely one third of what was needed. In sub-Saharan Africa the figure is appalling, six times too slow.
Lennart Bage, president of the Rome-based International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), says three quarters of the 1.2 billion people living in extreme poverty and subsisting on less than one dollar a day live and work in rural areas.
“The problem is that the trend to rural development has gone down and has to be reversed. Most institutions have devoted much less potential to rural development than 20 years ago. For example, the lending of the World Bank has gone down from 60 percent to just six percent,” Bage told Arab News during a recent visit to Saudi Arabia.
The rural poor suffer from interlocked disadvantages; they live in remote areas, are usually unhealthy and illiterate, have bigger families, work in insecure and relatively unproductive jobs and may experience discrimination as women and as members of ethnic minorities. Low self-esteem and disrespect from officials further compound their distress.
Bage cited several reasons for failure to break the vicious cycle and improve living conditions for rural population. First is the difficulty with agricultural projects intended to benefit the poor. These tend to be too large in scale, to much industrial, too much designed in places like Europe and the US to be applied in different ecosystems, institutions and cultures with conflicting ideas and values. “They are thus alien to many of the people. Now, we know we should have started from the bottom, from the people, and build on the success and devise solutions emanating from the local society.”
Poverty hits harder at the female population of rural areas where women are likely to be poorer than men; they are more vulnerable, own no property, are less educated and poorer in health which means they are unlikely to live as long.
In its rural poverty report for the year 2001, IFAD explores four themes; access to assets whether physical, natural, human and financial, technology and natural resources, markets and institutions. Underlying these themes is the fact that poverty reduction generally benefits from labor-incentive approaches, both to raise labor and increase land productivity.
“The only way to achieve a higher rate of growth in developing countries is to encourage the under-utilized capacities of the poor through broad-based rural development, centered on agricultural production.”
Like many other international agencies, IFAD faces the problem of inadequate funds to be able to pursue its programs. “We do not have enough funds and I hope we can by showing how important it is to work with rural development and agriculture in order to reach the international target of halving poverty by the year 2015. Never before in history has there been such a wide stretch of effort. If we do not have an impact, a clear effort in rural areas, we will not reach that target. Unfortunately, international assistance over the last decade has actually fallen resulting in a 40 percent reduction in aid to agriculture. International financial institutions have reduced their lending from 40 percent to around 5 percent today.”
The Fund is working on a program of $500 million annually. Over time it has been able to reach more than 240 million people, supporting 584 poverty alleviation programs in 114 countries while providing $7 billion to support these projects whose total investment cost was as much as $20.6 billion.
Bage commended the role of Saudi Arabia in the establishment of IFAD and supporting its programs. The Kingdom has so far provided $370 million or 11 percent of the Fund’s total contributions over the past two decade making it second only to the United States. Saudi Arabia’s Abdul Rahman Al-Sudairy, guided IFAD as its first President during its crucial formative years. “It was the foundation laid by Dr. Al-Sudairy that has allowed IFAD to grow into the effective institution against poverty that it is today,” he said.
While in the Kingdom he discussed with Saudi officials plans for development projects in Muslim countries covering crop and livestock rehabilitation and research and training with special emphasis on marine resources, environment and date farming.
Two major serious developments have further complicated the plight of the poor; migration to cities from rural areas and the AIDS epidemic. In most developing countries urban poverty is accentuated by rural-to-urban migration while the AIDS pandemic has ravaged the poorest countries wiping out whole communities. To this is added war and civil violence.
“Poverty on today’s scale is not only a human tragedy in itself but it poses a growing threat to social stability and acts as a reservoir for communicable diseases and a trigger for crime and strife. In sub-Saharan Africa where poverty has remained high, conflicts have proven the most unyielding. The AIDS pandemic has ravaged the poorest countries while the disease has been contained and even halted in richer states with effective health and education systems. When the disease first appeared in the 1980s there were more people infected in the US than in other places. But in advanced countries you have nutrition resources, trust in government and technology. In poor countries you lack these facilities,” said Bage.
AIDS, which is now raging havoc in Africa, is causing whole generations to disappear. It is in a way a symptom of poverty. The virus is everywhere in the world but to get an epidemic of the magnitude of Africa, only happens in poor countries because of lack of development and there is no way of having development if you do not have growth, he explained”
Bage was still optimistic of the world achieving the target of 50 percent less poverty by 2015. “It can still be attainable. In countries like China, India and Latin American states you have had a dramatic progress, there is now a better situation. The biggest number of the poor is in Asia but also the biggest development is found in Asia. In Africa you have 25 percent of the world poor and in Asia about 64 percent but the progress in development is bigger in Asia and the prospects are brighter. Even in Africa, it is important not to yield to this gloomy picture because there has been a lot of work and dramatic change in such countries like Mozambique. Things are also improving in Uganda and Tanzania.”
To achieve this goal, explains Bage, the poor should be looked at not as objects or a burden to the society but as subjects with the capacity to become the primary agents for change. Conditions have to be created to allow these groups to use their capacities more productively; empowering the poor as the central theme. One other vital change is altering the current monopoly of institutions since those who control institutions usually benefit the most.
The change should come by building institutions in which the poor have a strong voice. “This, perhaps, is the most difficult challenge for poverty eradication.”