IFAD’s objective is to contribute to accelerating and deepening the global process of reducing rural poverty and food insecurity. The Fund has an important role to play in achieving the Millennium Development Goals: directly, and catalytically, through sharing insights with other development partners as to who the rural poor are, how they become or remain poor, and how they may be enabled to overcome their poverty. There are many different groups of rural poor, with very different livelihood situations: smallholders, herders, fisherfolk, landless agricultural labourers, indigenous groups and, cutting across all of these, poor rural women. The varying situations of these people involve specific challenges, and IFAD is heavily engaged in developing different types of responses to each such challenge. However, a number of common elements are increasingly entering the environment of all groups of poor people – although they may be experienced differently. One of these elements is the organization and evolution of markets. Virtually all poor rural people rely on markets to access goods essential for their human, social and material development. In most cases, reducing such people’s poverty will require better linkages between small-scale poor producers and a variety of official and other local institutions, civil society and market actors, including medium- and larger-scale private-sector entities.