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''The key to sustainable rural development is legally-secure entitlement to assets – land, water, credit, information and technology – on the part of the poor. Without secure property rights, farmers lack the incentive to invest in land management.''
Typical assets are land, wells, cattle, tools, dwellings, vans, shares, skills, health and roads.
Well-targeted policies can reduce poverty by increasing the opportunities for poor people to gain and maintain secure access to productive assets, especially land, water and other natural resources, together with social assets such as extension services, education and basic healthcare.
Lack of assets is both an effect and a cause of poverty in terms of income opportunities, consumption and capability-building of people and their own institutions. People without assets tend to be consumption-poor because they rely mainly on selling their labour in poorly paid markets or to the landed class, because they have nothing to sell or mortgage in hard times, and because they are economically dependent and politically weak.
Pro-poor asset policy should concentrate on three main types of assets.
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First, land redistribution is a powerful weapon in the fight against poverty, and is essential for fast progress in very unequal rural areas with limited options. Small, fairly equal farms are good for employment, efficiency and growth. Yet land – often the main rural asset - is often locked into unequal and socially and economically inefficient farms.
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Second, policies should increase poor people’s control over water-yielding assets so they can improve their returns from land, meet family needs for drinking water, reduce female drudgery and reduce the incidence of debilitating water-borne diseases.
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Third, redistribution of chances to improve key human assets – including health, education, information and communication skills – should favour rural people, with particular attention to the poorest, women and girls, indigenous people and excluded minorities.
Farmland
- Control of the farmland is crucial for overcoming rural poverty.
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Land redistribution has been substantial and successful in many areas – small farms are usually at least as productive as large farms.
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As well as land, farmers need appropriate infrastructures and services.
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Women’s control of land helps increase efficiency and equity, and has a positive impact on child health and poverty reduction.
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The rural poor’s best prospects for escaping poverty are in farming.
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If the poor operate land, they can combine it with labour, skills and purchased inputs, consuming or selling the product and reaping a higher share of net income, even if output does not change.
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Land distribution also reduces the poor’s vulnerability. In an emergency, the landless have no land to sell or mortgage. Infant mortality is much higher among these groups than among those with land.
Water
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Water is vital to most types of production.
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Water is also vital to consumption (low quantity and quality drinking water in most developing countries harms health and, indirectly, productivity).
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Water is becoming scarcer and less reliable in much of the world.
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Pervasive water subsidies encourage waste, and are steered to the rich who control most water-yielding assets.
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In low-income countries, there is strong pressure to divert commercial water away from agriculture (now using 75-90% and paying far below market rates) towards thirsty townspeople who are willing to pay.
Giving The Rural Poor Control Over Water-Yielding Assets
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Well and pump permits may regulate pumping of groundwater resources, especially if fines or shutdowns are imposed for over-pumping.
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Irrigation technologies should respond to users’ needs. For poor farmers this often means building on traditional methods or introducing low-cost technology that is easy to operate and maintain.
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The poor can be helped to invest in their own wells, pumps and so on, with credit and technical assistance, input distribution, extension and the provision of hydrological data. Ownership of irrigation equipment can be feasible, even for the landless.
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Water user associations can help keep water-yielding assets, especially degraded large-scale public irrigation systems, well-managed, responsible to users and sustainable.
Human Assets
Human assets have an intrinsic value in raising capabilities and/or happiness, and an instrumental value in raising income – and thus access to further capabilities and happiness.
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Education – access to education differs sharply between rich and poor, and between urban and rural people. Education is good at reducing poverty for rural people who can use it to get better work or income from physical or natural capital, whether within farming or by leaving it.
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There are huge gaps between male and female educational access and literacy levels. These gaps are greater in rural areas and are greatest for the rural poor.
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Health and nutrition - the rural poor are especially handicapped by acute illness and injury (often untreated) in terms of earning, learning and quitting poverty and by chronic illness and injury due to their unfavourable health-work-home and, especially, water-sanitation environments and by low nutrition.
Better health, education and nutrition help people to escape from rural poverty by raising, first of all, the innovativeness, income and food production of farmers and workers in low-income areas; and secondly, by shifting to (and earning capacity from) cash-crop production, rural non-farm production and urban work.
Women’s disadvantage, in term of education, which is greatest for the rural poor, explains low female innovation. If corrected, it improves child health, education and nutrition in a cost-effective manner.
For further information contact:
At.Rahman@ifad.org
or G. Geissler@ifad.org
Corporate
Strategy Unit
Prepared
by the Communications and Public Affairs Unit
IFAD,
Via del Serafico 107, 00142, Rome, Italy
Tel:
(00) 3906 5459 2485, Fax (00) 3906 5459 2143
E-mail:
communications@ifad.org
