''Unless the poor have the power to participate in deciding which technology to use, they are unlikely to benefit from it. Better farm technology will most benefit farmers who are active partners in setting priorities for both research and extension.''

 Over 70% of the world’s extremely poor live in rural areas. They use over half their income to obtain staple food and receive over two thirds of their calories from this low-cost source, which usually they produce themselves. Yet, often, they are undernourished.

Improved bio-agricultural technology and water control took hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in 1965-90, mainly by raising food staples production, employment and affordability. Yet large regions and large numbers of the rural poor gained little from this achievement, and progress has slowed down across the world.

Poverty is often concentrated in areas where the technology to improve the production of staples has not yet been introduced. The rapid reduction in poverty in the next 20 years requires technical progress that is substantial at the smallholder level; that is quickly adopted by farmers across a wide range of hitherto neglected areas; that creates productive employment; and that improves the growth of food crops.

To reach their targets, techniques to help the poor must be:

• Capable of benefiting the mass of rural poor, whatever their status; and

• Adapted to tightening constraints of water and land depletion and loss of biodiversity.

New techniques should be:

• More productive of output per unit of input;

• More labour-intensive; but

• Adapted to seasonal labour demand and food needs;

• More robust against climatic, pest and labour-supply risks;

• More stable in labour-use and product-flow across seasons and years;

• Selecting products mainly made and/or used by the poor;

• Cutting or stabilizing the price of staples; and

• More sustainable in preserving land, water and biodiversity.

Bio-agricultural Research

Farmers and breeders raise yields by genetic selection for plant shape or chemistry that improves response to the normal environment and to unusually good or bad seasons for, say, rainfall or insect populations.

• Bioagricultural innovation can aim to increase ‘conversion efficiency’; ‘partition efficiency’ – the proportion of the plant or animal comprising food or other economically valuable materials; or ‘extraction efficiency’ – the capacity of a plant or animal to find and use up nutrients or water.

• Genetically modified crops have the potential to reduce the poverty of the poor by increasing their supply of food from difficult land, but it is only with the full participation of civil society and institutions that the technology can be shared and applied. The effects of ignoring new approaches to poverty, nutrition, hunger and survival could be very damaging.

• Bioagricultural research for crop-water response is crucial to the rural poor, both because the poor are most harmed by ever-increasing water scarcity, and because they are most exposed to risks of drought and least able to bear them.

Improved Land Management Technology (ILMT)

By 1990, about one fifth of the land in developing countries (excluding wastelands) was affected by soil erosion or nutrient loss, two thirds of it badly enough to destroy or greatly reduce land usefulness for agricultural production.

Land degradation is worst in ‘hotspots’ such as the foothills of the Himalayas, sloping areas in Southern China, South-East Asia and the Andes, forest margins in East Asia and the Amazon, rangelands in Africa and West and Central Asia, and in the Sahel. Such places have concentrations of rural poor, often as ethnic minorities.

ILMT is sorely needed to raise or maintain natural resource quality. Examples include:

range management to reduce overgrazing; soil humus restoration through composts;

animal-crop rotational grazing; crop rotation; agroforestry and fallowing systems; land reclamation; and earth or vegetative bunds against erosion.

Water Technology and The Poor

It is vital that more emphasis be placed on researching and spreading pro-poor water control techniques, instead of assuming that they already exist but that farmers refuse to adopt them or that the rural poor are well served by traditional methods. Better methods of water delivery, economy and control are vital because, with urbanization and development, agriculture’s share of commercially-extracted water should and will fall.

Access to technology

However, while research is critical, even within the sphere of technology, it is not enough on its own. The rural poor need more information about technological options. Given that the sources of ‘advice’ are proliferating (increasingly including private-sector interests and NGOs), it is imperative that the capacity of the poor to evaluate advice be enhanced. This is a necessary social revolution in technology: elevating the poor from technology objects (or recepients) to technology subjets, involved in specification of need, evaluation of responses and choice of productive strategies.

Conclusion

Historically, poverty reduction has rested on pro-poor technical progress that raised entitlements to food staples. Since 1950, rising numbers of workers seeking employment income and, recently, the threat of land and water degradation has made technical progress more urgent.

Whether by conventional or by transgenic techniques, bioagricultural research can help the poor by wrapping the benefits in the seed rather than requiring costly purchases of inputs. An important bioagricultural contribution can be made to improving environmental sustainability, both through biodiversity and through varieties of crops and animals capable of providing high returns with less polluting and depleting methods of land-soil-water management. Integration of bioagricultural research with other activities to improve the robustness, sustainability and yields of poor people’s farming is a priority.

If poor people’s needs are to be met, biotechnology must be redirected from its focus on the needs of the rich and integrated into the environmental and food-safety concerns of developing countries. This can be done only with the cooperation of, and incentives to, the private companies involved, some of which realise the dangers, even to themselves, of their present isolation from the needs of the poor.

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