Rural jobs key to UN's poverty feight

from The Hindustan Times

Kumkum Chadha

In 2006 the rate of economic growth in the Asia Pacific region rose to over seven per cent but performance was poor in the areas of infant mortality, HIV prevalence and access to basic glitation in urban areas.

• The same year Latin America and the Caribbean showed positive economic performance yet 60 percent of the rural population lives below the poverty line. The region also shows a high-level of income disparity.

• Although a third of the countries in eastern and southern Africa have projected economic growth rates of over five percent, the number of people living on less than $1 a day continues to increase.

The solution: To stem the flow of people from the countryside to cities and halt the erosion of rural economies, the focus must be on empowerment.

And the emphasis must shift from maintaining people to helping them prosper To achieve this a two-pronged strategy should be adopted: promote development and fight poverty.

This was the work plan hammered out at the UN's International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) meeting held here.

Underlining the need for partnership, delegates from 165 member countries converged to discuss rural employment and livelihoods at the Palazzo dei Congressi.

They included Mozambique's Prime Minister Luisa Dias Diogo and Italy's Finance Minister Tommaso Padoa Schioppa, among others.

IFAD hosted three round table meets, which debated rural employment in all its aspects, including migration and generating livelihood opportunities for rural youth.

While the consequences of rural migration to urban areas were explored, the need for a development policy to support rural youth was underlined.

Discussions centered around how young people were neglected by policymakers and development practitioners in poverty reduction programmes: "Development policies in the past 30 years have been urban biased.

They have failed to benefit rural areas from the growth generated by market economies because of lack of infrastructure and lack of investment in agriculture in rural areas" said Samir Radwan, an expert on the Near East and North African region.

Professor Aziz Khan from the Columbia University said lack of productivity in agriculture results in high rural out-migration: "Poor rural people need to be able to make a living from agriculture or we need to help them find alternative sources of income" Khan said.