Knowledge

Agriculture and rural development research will play a critical role in meeting the ambitious targets under SDGs 1 and 2. 

IFAD’s vision of inclusive and sustainable rural transformation fits closely with the ambitions of the 2030 Agenda. We work to create the social and economic conditions that can transform rural areas into places of prosperity and hope, where people can build decent livelihoods. Increasingly, IFAD acts as an assembler of development finance, mobilizing resources from a range of sources to fund projects that empower poor rural people to grow, process and sell more food, increase their incomes and determine the direction of their own lives. 

A set of specific priorities and actionable outcomes resulted from the GFRID 2018. These are directly linked to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. 

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) target an interrelated set of issues that must be addressed to eradicate hunger and poverty and ensure a future in which no one is left behind. This year’s High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) focuses on “Transformation towards sustainable
and resilient societies”. The SDGs relating to water (SDG6), energy (SDG7), human settlements (SDG11), responsible consumption and production (SDG12), life on land (SDG15) and partnerships (SDG17) will be under in-depth review. In that context, the rural world – where most poor and hungry people live – deserves special attention.

Despite much progress – extreme poverty has been halved since the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were adopted in 1990 – there are still 767 million extremely poor people in the world, and more than 75 per cent of them live in the rural areas of developing countries. Population increases and rising incomes are creating a growing demand for food, which creates both opportunities and challenges for people working in rural areas, including in smallholder agriculture and in the non-farm economy. Rising agricultural productivity, more jobs off the farm and migration are reshaping rural lives, but so too are climate change, environmental degradation, conflict and forced displacement.

IFAD’s experience in developing countries over the past 40 years clearly shows that investing in rural people leads to poverty reduction and economic growth that go beyond agriculture and rural areas. IFAD’s 2016 Rural Development Report presented evidence that inclusive and sustainable rural transformation is fundamental to economic and social growth, and to poverty reduction at the national level.

In 2015, Member States of the United Nations issued a call to action to eradicate global poverty, reduce economic inequality and place the world on a more sustainable pathway: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. 

Investing in inclusive and sustainable rural transformation is strategically important for the 2030 Agenda. This has been broadly recognized in debates about the SDGs, particularly the roles of sustainable agriculture, food security and nutrition in relation to SDG2, the eradication of hunger. It is important to recognize that the eradication of hunger is inseparable from the eradication of poverty in all its forms (SDG1). While poverty is often the main driver of food insecurity and malnutrition, hunger and malnutrition also result in the inability to escape poverty. Investments targeted at rural people are needed not only to ensure no one is left behind, but also to unlock the catalytic role that inclusive rural transformation has been shown to play in reducing and eradicating poverty and hunger, as well as promoting wider prosperity.