Poverty Alleviation and Smallholder Agriculture: The Rural Poverty Report 2011

摘要

As miserable as it is, poverty seems to be endemic in our world. Currently some 1.4 billion people are living on less than US$ 1.25 a day: they are facing extreme poverty. The majority of them (70 per cent) live in the countryside. That is to say, there are 1 billion rural poor. Most of them depend partly, or to a large degree, on farming. At the same time the world is experiencing frequent food price hikes that seem to reflect acute shortages, and longer-term perspectives make it clear that food production needs to be increased considerably in the decades leading up to 2050, which is assumed to be the time when the global population will peak. The new Rural Poverty Report from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IF AD) addresses the confluence of these two phenomena, saying 'to sum up, the global environment of agricultural and food markets is evolving in a direction that appears to provide greater incentives for investment in rural areas of developing countries and greater opportunities for agriculture - including smallholder agriculture - to play a key role in driving rural growth and ensuring food security' (p. 34).