The main goal of development is to reduce poverty in a sustainable manner.

''With focused support for enhancing the productive potential of the poor in a pro-poor environment, the poor can help themselves to escape from poverty. Growth and distribution are essential for poverty reduction. But sustained poverty reduction also requires pro-poor institutions and the building of partnerships among the rural poor and other stakeholders.''

1.2 Billion people survive on less than one dollar per day

• 44 per cent South Asia;
• 24 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa;
• 24 per cent in East Asia;
• 6.5 per cent in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Three quarters of these people, almost 1 billion, live and work in rural areas. Most of the poor are rural and will be so for several decades. Their income, spending and employment usually centre on food. They have little land, less access to education and health services or other important assets, and they face many interlocking barriers to progress.

The ill-being caused by poverty has many dimensions – inadequate income and consumption, but also less developed capabilities due to asset deprivation, inability to afford decent healthcare and education, lack of power and self-esteem and a low life expectancy.

Poverty and hunger fell massively in 1975-90, mainly thanks to rural and agricultural development, but this has stalled during the last decade. The share of international aid for agriculture and rural development, for least-developed countries and activities relevant to the rural poor has been small and is still falling.

Globally, the rate of poverty reduction in 1990-99 was less than one third of that needed to halve poverty in the period 1995-2015, and six times too slow in sub-Saharan Africa. The real value of aid fell sharply between 1988 and 1998. The share of aid to low-income or least-developed countries, which contain over 85% of the poor, has stayed at around 63%. And agricultural aid has fallen.

 ''Poverty is multidimensional; therefore poverty reduction efforts have to be multi-targeted and they are expected to show wide and diverse dimensions. The solutions have to straddle different disciplines and must encompass economic, social, political and institutional factors.''

The Rural Poverty Report 2001 explores four themes: access to assets (physical, natural, human and financial); technology and natural resources for rural poverty reduction; markets for the rural poor; and institutions for the rural poor. Other issues are important also, but the Report focuses particularly on often neglected, but critical, aspects of poverty reduction.

Assets empower the rural poor by increasing their incomes, protecting them against shocks and providing them with choices to escape from harsh or exploitative conditions. The poor can directly control assets by ownership, rent or communal tenure, or indirectly gain from assets earned through employment.

Technology makes an important contribution to reducing rural poverty. Technical progress has by-passed hundreds of millions of poor people. Water and land resources are seriously threatened by depletion and pollution. But appropriate technical change can reduce or reverse this trend. The reverse side of the coin is that poverty reduction and natural resource sustainability can be harmed by inappropriate technology. Technology should be adapted to the needs of the rural poor with the objective of increasing employment and output.

Markets for the rural poor. Almost everywhere, rural people living in remote, ill-connected areas are poorer. They face very high physical and transaction marketing costs per kilometre-tonne. Market access is needed, both for their inputs (seeds, tools, fertilizer, etc.) and for their outputs.

Institutions and the rural poor. The distribution of benefits between the rich and the poor, the urban and the rural, and between men and women, depends on institutions (organizations such as banks) and on rules (customary or legal) such as those affecting the division of inherited land, or landlord/tenant shares in a sharecropping arrangement. Sustainable rural poverty reduction must address problems of smallholder agriculture, including changes in social and economic relations that usually involve institutional reform that gives the poor greater control over their own environment.

Four aspects are of critical importance in understanding the challenges facing rural poverty reduction:

Underlying all four themes is the fact that rural poverty reduction generally benefits from labour-intensive approaches. This does not mean drudgery, but rather selecting and developing techniques and product mixes that, while supporting farmers and farm workers with skills, seeds or tools, raise both labour productivity and the productivity of land and capital much more quickly.

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