Enabling poor rural people
to overcome poverty
At
the heart of every human experience is the desire to survive and prosper.
To live without fear, hunger or suffering. To imagine how your life could
be better and then have the means yourself to change it. Yet, every day,
1.2 billion people – one fifth of the world’s inhabitants
– cannot fulfil their most basic needs, let alone attain their dreams
or desires.
This book is about the largest segment of the world’s poor – the 900 million poor women, children and men who live in rural environments. These are the subsistence farmers and herders, the fisherfolk and migrant workers, the artisans and indigenous peoples whose daily struggles seldom capture world attention.
What meets the eye, a collection of 111 photographs, records the lives of poor people in rural settings around the world. This unique volume illustrates that poverty isn’t always what meets the eye. For in each photograph, in each face you encounter, there are glimpses of determination, moments of joy – signs that even when there is nothing else, there is always hope.
Poverty has many faces, some more obvious than others. Consider the photograph of the woman opposite this page. She stands at the edge of a field holding one of the few pieces of agricultural ‘technology’ she owns – a hand hoe. How much food and money can she generate with such meagre resources? The reason for her poverty seems obvious. Or does it? For many of the world’s rural poor, poverty is not just a question of income. Indeed, there are many factors that force people onto the economic fringes, among them physical and social isolation, discrimination and gender inequality, ineffective government policies and a lack of political representation. For many, poverty is further aggravated by HIV/AIDS, which has devastated much of southern and eastern Africa. Millions of small farmers have died and many more are too sick to tend their fields.
Like all good pictures, the deeper you
look, the more you see. The woman in the photograph appears to be enjoying
a light rain. Subsistence farmers around the world depend on rainfall
to grow crops. Yet cycles of drought, worsened by erratic weather patterns
associated with global climate change, make it increasingly difficult
for poor farmers to grow enough food to feed their families, let alone
harvest crops to sell. In the case of the farmer in this photograph, one
can’t help but wonder how she would get her produce to markets even
if, in a good year, she had any surplus to sell? There’s no evidence
of a road, a town or even a power line. Indeed, in looking at this photograph,
one might ask why is she there at all – toiling in a harsh environment
with just a hand hoe? For so many who struggle to survive in highly degraded
rural environments, the answer to that question is simple – they
have no choice. Many of the world’s rural poor are indigenous peoples
who have been pushed onto the least fertile and most fragile lands. In
these isolated places, far from centres of commerce and power, they have
few opportunities to improve their lives, to access basic services or
to influence the institutions and policies that could change their lives.
Empowering rural people is an essential first step to eradicating poverty. It respects the willingness and capability that each of us has to take charge of our own life and to seek out opportunities to make it better.
For those looking in from the outside, poverty is seldom what meets the eye. So much of what drives people into destitution lies hidden below the surface. The woman in the photograph might be poor for any number of reasons, including war and civil strife, government corruption, or the unfairness of agricultural export subsidies that make it impossible for poor farmers to compete. Respecting the complexities of poverty is crucial, just as looking into the faces of the rural poor and recognizing them as individuals with a right to determine their own futures is important to finding lasting solutions.
One picture, one life among more than 900 million rural people burdened by poverty.
Lennart Båge
President of IFAD
For several years, Sarasu, a single
mother of seven children in rural India, struggled to feed her family
on just 20 rupees (less than 50 US cents) a day. Saving money was impossible,
and without collateral she didn’t qualify for a bank loan. Then,
in 1989, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) initiated
the Tamil Nadu Women’s Development Project, an innovative idea that
promoted an informal group-based system of saving and lending. The premise
was simple: after women paid into a communal account, they could remove
funds as loans when needed. Determined to improve her life, Sarasu met
the minimum savings requirement and, soon after, took out a loan to buy
two dairy cows. Sales from the milk raised her income to 100 rupees a
day. Another loan helped her start a firewood business. Now, years later,
both loans have been repaid and two of Sarasu’s children have graduated
from university.
This is development: real, positive change in the lives of real people who are eager to achieve it, if only given a chance. But at present many in the world are being denied that chance. Well over a billion people go to bed hungry every night. Development means enabling such people, as well as another two billion who are only marginally better off, to build a better life. IFAD was created for that very purpose: to give poor people living in rural areas the ways and means to make lasting changes in their lives. Born out of the severe food shortages and fear of famine that marked the early 1970s, IFAD was created for a purpose that lies at the very heart of the United Nations: to form global alliances across geographic and ideological boundaries that bring people together for the shared goal of eradicating poverty and hunger. Now, 25 years later, partnerships – with governments, non-governmental organizations, grass-roots organizations, the private sector, United Nations agencies and others – continue to be one of the keys to IFAD’s effectiveness.
When people and organizations work together, they can accomplish anything.
We can tackle the underlying factors that allow poverty to persist and
famine to recur. We can increase agricultural productivity. We can pursue
the changes that will help empower the rural poor to increase their resilience
and their ability to cope with economic changes, famine, diseases and
other factors that can undermine their hard work. And we can overcome
HIV/AIDS, which is wreaking havoc in some of the poorest countries in
the world, particularly in southern and eastern Africa.
In the Millennium Declaration, world leaders committed themselves to halving,
by the year 2015, the proportion of people living in extreme poverty and
hunger. We can reach this goal, but only if we remember that three quarters
of the world’s poor live in rural areas and draw their livelihoods
from agriculture and other rural activities. The images in this special
collection of photographs, created to mark IFAD’s 25 years of partnerships
with poor people in rural communities, remind us of this very fact. To
eradicate poverty, we must fight it in rural areas, where most of the
world’s poor people live.
Kofi A. Annan
Secretary-General of the United Nations
At first glance, the people
featured in this book appear to have little in common. They are herders,
fisherfolk, farmers and entrepreneurs, of many different religions and
ages, from 10 countries on four continents. Even so, when a large number
of photographs are presented together in a book such as this, it is possible
to see how their lives are representative of all who are poor and live
in rural places. As a whole, these photographs are more an anthology of
self-determination than destitution. They evoke empathy and compassion
while reminding us that, for the uninitiated, poverty can be a stranger,
unknown and easily misunderstood.
Yet the reasons why one person is poor and another is rich are not so difficult to understand. Often, it has less to do with the individual and more to do with circumstances, opportunities and chance. People who live in rural areas in developing countries are often poor because they do not have access to essential things that others use to secure wealth – political influence, property rights, education, health care, clean water, shelter and reliable food supplies. When natural and man-made phenomena, such as drought, environmental degradation, disease and armed conflict are added to the equation, struggling people are pushed to the breaking point. This contributes to a downward and expanding spiral of poverty and hunger that eventually destroys communities, regions and entire countries.
In 1960, the income gap between the one fifth of the world’s people living in the richest countries and the one fifth living in the poorest was 30 to 1. By 1997, that gap had widened to 74 to 1. Now, as the lightning-quick forces of globalization move goods, information and money across borders, the income gap between rich and poor widens even further. By 1999, the assets of the world’s three richest billionaires were greater than the combined gross national product of the least developed countries and their 600 million people.
The benefits of globalization have yet to reach over half the world’s population – the three billion people who live on less than US$ 2 a day. But income is only a symptom of poverty, not its cause. The bigger challenge is understanding why so many people can’t earn enough to live a decent life. In many cases, as a number of the photographs in this book illustrate, isolation is a contributing factor. Living far from centres of power, poor rural people seldom have a voice in the policies and decisions that influence their lives. Rural communities often exist without basic services such as roads, electricity, schools and health clinics. For many people, just getting their goods to markets is a tremendous challenge, let alone interpreting the global conditions that influence prices. Empowerment gives people dignity, a sense of inclusion and the strength to shape their own destinies.
Poverty
is responsible for more sickness, suffering and death than any disease
on earth. Each year, for example, as many as 800 million people endure
chronic malnutrition and its associated diseases as a consequence of poverty.
Of this group, the greatest percentage of victims live in rural areas
in the developing world. To some, it may seem paradoxical that communities
centred around growing food are plagued by periods of hunger, but hunger
isn’t just the result of a lack of food. The root cause of hunger
is poverty itself.
In many developing countries, for example, agricultural production depends on rainfall. During periods of drought, such as those experienced in parts of Africa, subsistence farmers not only lose their crops but are too poor to buy the foods available in local markets. In reality, most poor people go hungry because they don’t have money or they can’t access the resources they need to grow food themselves. In rural areas, the poorest people are often pushed onto the least fertile and most fragile lands, or they are landless. They seldom have secure property rights or reliable access to roads, electricity, education, financial credit and health care. They may also live in countries where their rights and democratic freedoms have been denied. These essential conditions are what many in the world rely on to build wealth and to ensure stability in their lives. Without these conditions, poverty and hunger grow.
Food for thought
For millions
of children each year, the most lethal consequence of poverty is malnutrition.
It happens when children don’t receive enough foods that are high
in protein, calories or micronutrients, and is characterized by low weight
and less than average height-for-age. One in four children in the world
is affected, with 70 per cent living in Asia, 26 per cent in Africa and
4 per cent in Latin America and the Caribbean.
For many children, malnutrition starts in their mothers’ wombs. In poor rural communities, pregnant women are often undernourished and give birth to undernourished babies. These children are at greater risk of infectious diseases and death. As a consequence, children from the poorest rural areas are three-to-five times more likely to die before their fifth birthday than children from wealthier households.
Even for those who survive, there may be no escape from the destructive forces of poverty and malnutrition. As children continue to have inadequate diets, their physical and mental development is further impaired. Without energy to take part in activities or the mental acuity and resources to stimulate learning, many will find it difficult to improve their lives in the future. In the end, individuals, communities and entire countries suffer.
Living off the land
Over half
of the world’s porest people live off the land, either as farmers
or as farm labourers. Yet most of those who depend on income from agriculture
have little control over the land they farm. Poor people in rural areas
seldom possess secure property rights or share in the benefits of wealth-building
assets, such as access to grazing lands, electric power, roads, schools,
health clinics or water resources. There are many reasons why poor people
in rural areas don’t benefit from local resources, but one of the
most significant is uncertain land tenure. The best farmland, for example,
is often owned and controlled by an elite few. If poor people are given
property rights at all, it’s usually to the lowest-quality lands
with the least access to water, roads and electricity.
Without secure land tenure, it can be difficult for poor farmers to reap the rewards of their labour or to invest in sustainable land management practices. This creates a spiral of decline that twins increasing environmental degradation with increasing poverty. Inevitably, with nothing to sell or mortgage during hard times, many of the poorest farmers have no choice but to migrate to other rural areas or to already over-crowded cities, where they sell their labour for low wages.
Land redistribution can be a powerful weapon in the fight against poverty, and can stem the flow of migration to already over-burdened cities. Small family farms can be more productive and efficient than larger ones. In Kerala, India, for example, modest land reforms combined with public investments in education and health care services have achieved dramatic results in reducing poverty.
Around the world, the incidence of poverty falls as the amount of land owned or operated by poor people rises. Even so, land reforms that are imposed on others or concentrate benefits in the hands of the most powerful citizens can sometimes be more damaging than beneficial. Developing land reform policies that respect the specific needs of local communities is essential to eradicating poverty in the long run.
Six thousand
years ago, Sumerian farmers in Mesopotamia dug a ditch that allowed water
from the Euphrates River to flow over their thirsty crops. For the Sumerians,
this single act marked the start of 2000 years of abundant food supplies
and a thriving civilization. Today, the Sumerians are gone but their legacy
lives on. About 40 per cent of the world’s food now grows on irrigated
soil.
Agriculture uses 70 per cent of the world’s water resources. In Asia, for example, one third of cropland is irrigated and produces two thirds of total crops. In sub-Saharan Africa, staple food crops are usually rainfed and are therefore more vulnerable to drought. Although there are many contributing factors, the lack of access to abundant water helps explain why so many rural Africans are among the poorest and most food-insecure people in the world.
Too often, the poorest people have the least access to water. For those who live in rural areas of the developing world, the quantity and quality of water is often poor, water-borne diseases are an ongoing threat, and many women and girls sacrifice time and earning power fetching water from distant wells and rivers. As the world’s population continues to grow and more water is diverted to people who can afford to pay for it in cities and towns, the water crisis for poor people in rural areas will only get worse. Indeed, over the next quarter of a century, the number of people living in water-stressed countries is expected to climb from 500 million to three billion.
The challenge is to find location-specific solutions that are sustainable over the long term. Some ideas include reducing water losses on farms and in cities by introducing low-cost technologies, promoting re-use of water and rethinking policies that encourage over-consumption or misallocation. Promoting water-economizing crop varieties is also high on the agenda. Special attention will need to be given to the poorest people who live in rural communities, especially in Africa. Wherever viable, irrigation schemes, particularly micro-irrigation programmes that are sustainable and can be controlled directly by farmers themselves, will also be part of the solution.
One of the most effective ways of reducing poverty in rural communities is by supporting the ingenuity of rural people. Self-employment constitutes 50 to 70 per cent of the labour force among the poorest populations in developing countries. In fact, it is estimated that about 500 million individuals run micro businesses. Yet fewer than 10 million of these people, or about 2.5 per cent, are able to obtain loans from banks or traditional lending institutions. Poor people seldom have the income or collateral to obtain loans. And even when they do, the amounts they require are often too small to appeal to banks.
Worldwide, the gulf between the amount of credit extended to the rich
and the amount
of credit extended to the poor grows daily. Accessing small amounts of
credit at reasonable interest rates gives people with the willingness
and know-how an opportunity to set up small businesses. Records show that
poor people represent a good risk, with higher repayment rates than conventional
borrowers. In countries as diverse as Bangladesh, Benin and Dominica,
loan repayments are as high as 97 per cent.
Poor women have the best credit ratings. A 1999 study of Bangladesh microfinance programmes, for example, found that women defaulted on loans one third less often than men. The study also found that credit extended to women had a much greater impact. Household consumption, for example, was twice as great when the borrowers were women, translating into improved quality of life for children.
Seventy-five per cent of the world’s poorest people live in rural areas. Microfinance is one way of fighting poverty in the places where the poorest people live. Using small loans to purchase seed, fertilizer, tools and nets, or to start up microenterprises, millions of rural women and men are given the opportunity to find their own solutions.
In developing
countries, rural women carry out most of the agricultural work. They own
less than two per cent of the land, have limited access to education and
financial resources, and have far less say than men in decisions that
affect their futures. Nearly all the household and community work done
by women worldwide is unpaid.
Women and girls are responsible for producing food, caring for animals, collecting fuel and fetching water. They carry heavy steel buckets, clay pots or plastic jugs weighing up to 25 kilograms over long distances. Indeed, one study in Mozambique found that rural women walked more than two hours a day just to get water for cooking, drinking and cleaning. The burden of fetching water can prevent girls from attending school and women from earning a living.
Educated
girls have more choices – in marriage, in childbearing, in work
and in life. Yet many girls face cultural and economic barriers that prevent
them from attending school. In developing countries, nearly two thirds
of the 110 million primary-school-age children not attending school are
girls. There are many reasons for promoting girls’ education. Educated
women, for example, marry at an older age and have fewer children. In
fact, in cultures where it’s common for girls to marry as young
as 13 or 14 years of age, just one extra year of schooling reduces fertility
rates by 5 to 10 per cent.
Educated women are better prepared to play decision-making roles in their homes and communities. They also tend to be more productive at work and better paid. In some countries, returns on educational investment are actually higher for women than for men. Studies from a number of countries suggest that an extra year of schooling will increase a woman’s future earnings by about 15 per cent, compared with 11 per cent for a man. Giving birth to fewer children, and with more money to invest in those they have, it’s not surprising that educated women have healthier children that are more likely to survive. In India, for example, the infant mortality rate of babies whose mothers have received primary education is about half that of children whose mothers are illiterate. Ultimately, poverty is the greatest obstacle to educating all children – girls and boys. In many countries, children from the poorest households receive no schooling at all.
There are
more than 300 million indigenous peoples living in about 70 countries
around the world. Most are poor. For a variety of historical and political
reasons, many indigenous people have been pushed onto the least fertile
and most fragile lands in some of the world’s most isolated places.
In the Peruvian Andes, the Himalayas and the highlands of Viet Nam, for
example, indigenous people often live at the highest altitudes where they
face the harshest conditions.
Poverty in mountain regions and other rural areas has a great deal to do with inaccessibility, with the complexity and fragility of mountain environments, and with the extent to which indigenous people are marginalized. In the Peruvian Andes, two of every three households can’t access enough arable land to grow the food required to meet their nutritional needs. Soils in many of these harsh environments are depleted of minerals and micronutrients, thus increasing the risk of vitamin deficiency among those who live there.
Indigenous people living in isolated rural environments have few opportunities to improve their lives, to access basic services or to influence the institutions and policies that may change their lives in the future. They are less likely, for example, to have access to roads, schools and health care. Increasingly, indigenous people are also being displaced by outsiders, who come to expropriate and exploit local forests, minerals and water. Few indigenous people profit from the resources being taken out. Making matters worse, resource extraction is seldom managed sustainably, leaving indigenous people to live in the degraded environments the outsiders leave behind.
Growth
in agricultural productivity is only beneficial if a market exists to
sell goods. Too many agricultural investments have failed because they
concentrated on increasing production but neglected to identify potential
markets or the lack of them. That’s why it’s important to
consider all elements in the production continuum – from planting
to processing to sale. Roads and transport must be in place so that goods
can be delivered where they’re needed. Lines of communication must
be established so that vital information on market prices reaches rural
areas in a timely and dependable manner. As trade liberalization and globalization
expand, more opportunities will arise for poor people to benefit from
trade. But unless they gain knowledge about market systems and have a
voice in shaping policy decisions, they could be left even further behind.
Many of
the photographs in this book reveal a simple truth about agriculture in
some of the world’s poorest places. The hand hoe – the first
known farming implement dating back about 10000 years – continues
to be integral to agricultural production in many developing countries,
particularly in Africa. It is the tool most used by men and women in Burkina
Faso, Senegal, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. In some areas, such as the
Central Plateau of Burkina Faso and in parts of Uganda, it is the only
tool used by poorer women farmers. The short handle-length of many hand
hoes requires users to be bent over for hours at a time and, with few
other tools to work with, poor farmers can only till small plots of land.
The price of a hand hoe, while extremely expensive for poor farmers who often live on less than US$ 1 a day, averages about US$ 1.75 in many African countries.
Many
rural people have a vast and valuable knowledge about local plant and
animal species, and about how to farm sustainably under local conditions.
Over millennia, they have grown to understand the importance of shifting
cultivation, of terraced fields, of recognizing plants with healing properties
and of the sustainable harvesting of food, fodder and fuelwood from forests.
In the Andes, for example, farmers know of as many as 200 different varieties
of indigenous potatoes. In the mountains of Nepal, they farm approximately
2000 varieties of rice. Farmers in Burundi and Rwanda plant between six
and 30 different varieties of beans to exploit subtle differences in elevation,
climate and soil. Without the wisdom acquired by generations of rural
dwellers, much of the land they farm would be severely degraded and the
biodiversity found in these isolated regions would be unknown.
People
everywhere want to be free to determine their own future. But in many
countries people are not free to express their views or to take part in
the political institutions – formal and informal, regional and national
– that shape their lives. Having a political voice is as important
to human development as being able to read or to enjoy good health.
During the 1980s and 1990s, a great deal of progress was made worldwide in opening up political systems and expanding political freedoms. Today, 140 of the world’s nearly 200 countries hold multiparty elections. Globalization has forged an even greater interdependence between regions and countries, but in many ways the world is more fragmented than it has been in decades. The division between the rich and the poor has grown deeper. The threat of global terrorism and armed conflict looms even higher.
There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that, if they are ever to achieve the economic prosperity they desire, very poor countries need first to concentrate on human rights and democracy. When people have no voice, when they can’t achieve the political actions needed to change their lives, violence often erupts. Since 1990, more than 3.6 million people have died as a result of civil wars and ethnic violence, more than 16 times the number killed in wars between countries.
Between 1987 and 1997, more than 85 per cent of the world’s armed conflicts were civil wars fought within the borders of individual countries. Fourteen conflicts took place in African countries, including Angola, Burundi, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia and The Sudan. Another 14 were recorded in Asia, including conflicts in Cambodia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Viet Nam.
Although the reasons for conflicts can be complex and varied, their effects on the poorest populations are universally devastating. Conflict prevents poor farmers from carrying out fundamental life-sustaining tasks such as collecting water or planting and harvesting crops. At the same time, infrastructure such as roads, schools and homes is destroyed and populations are displaced in the process. It’s estimated that in 2002 alone there were 12 million international refugees and 20 to 25 million internally displaced people as a consequence of armed conflicts.
At the start of the new millennium,
the leaders of 189 Member States of the United Nations gathered to establish
a new vision for humanity. In their Millennium Declaration, they pledged
to “...free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and
dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty...”. What began as a
pledge soon became a series of goals that, in combination, could transform
the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the globe.
The Millennium Development Goals set out to eradicate extreme poverty
and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality
and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat
HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; and ensure environmental sustainability.
The achievement of these goals, and meeting their targets and timetables,
has now become the central thrust for many governments, donors and development
organizations worldwide.
Nonetheless, achieving the target to halve the proportion of extremely poor people in the world by the year 2015 will require enormous commitment and financial resources. It’s estimated, for example, that more than US$ 50 billion a year in development aid will be needed, over and above current spending, to meet the targets worldwide. Although some countries have stepped up their aid commitments, overall financial pledges still fall below what’s needed.
Seventy-five per cent of the world’s poorest people live in rural areas. Eradicating poverty will require a number of approaches, including finding on-the-ground solutions that empower people in the places they live.
This collection
of photographs was taken by five of the world’s leading photo-journalists:
Alexandra Boulat, David Alan Harvey, Gerd Ludwig, Pascal Maitre and Alex
Webb. Although each had worked in developing countries before, this particular
assignment was a unique challenge because it required them to look at
rural poverty not as a backdrop to another issue but as the story itself.
Alexandra Boulat was originally trained in graphic art and art history, and worked as a successful painter in her native city of Paris. In 1989, she made the switch to photojournalism and now contributes regularly to National Geographic, Paris-Match, Newsweek and Time, where her photographs document everything from revolution and war to oil spills and drought. Boulat has won numerous awards for her work, including the Golden Visa Award at the Perpignan photojournalism festival (France, 1998) and the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography (New York, USA, 1999).
David Alan Harvey, a Magnum photographer, has been a contributor to National Geographic since 1972. He is a winner of the National Press Photographers Association’s Photographer of the Year award and winner of the Life Magazine Award for Best Photo-Essay. His books, Cuba and Divided Soul, were published in 1999 and 2003, respectively, by the National Geographic Society and by Phaidon.
Gerd Ludwig is a German citizen living in Los Angeles. National Geographic has recently published Broken Empire: After the Fall of the USSR, a ten-year retrospective of his photographs taken in the former Soviet Union. Ludwig has undertaken assignments for Time, Life, Newsweek, Fortune, Geo, Stern and Spiegel, and he is a regular contributor to National Geographic. Over the years he has worked in more than 70 countries.
Pascal Maitre’s recently published book, Mon Afrique, is an insightful collection of photographs that reveal an Africa unfamiliar to many westerners. Maitre, who is based in France, works frequently with Geo. He has also contributed to l’Express and Figaro in France, Stern, Spiegel and Brigitte in Germany, and to Life in the United States. Maitre has travelled and photographed extensively in sub-Saharan Africa.
Alex Webb, a member of Magnum Photos since 1979, has contributed to the New York Times Magazine, Life, Geo, Stern and National Geographic. He has published six books, including Hot Light/ Half-Made Worlds (1986), Under a Grudging Sun (1989), Amazon (1997) and Crossings (2003). Webb received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1990, a Hasselblad Foundation Grant in 1998 and the Leica Medal of Excellence in 2000. He has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe.