How the scramble to score Millennium Goals has increased hunger and poverty in the rural areas

The world’s major donors are continuing to strive to meet the UN’s eight Millennium Development Goals by 2015.  The ultimate goal is to halve world poverty during this time.  DFID’s recent review confirms that the UK is targeting universal education, maternal health and child mortality in order to achieve Goals 2, 3, 4 and 5. 

Unfortunately none of the MDGs relate directly to the agricultural sector and donors have realised that it is quicker and easier to reach these goals if efforts are focussed in the overcrowded, poverty stricken, urban slums of Africa and India.  Such efforts also have the advantage of contributing to Goal 7, i.e. improving the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020.  This narrow approach has led to the neglect of the rural poor and a massive and accelerating increase in rural to urban migration over the past decade.

It was expected that Goal 1: the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, could be achieved by creating economic growth in urban areas, leading to ‘full and productive employment and decent work for all’.

This expectation has been thwarted by the recent global economic crisis which has caused a massive rise in unemployment in developing countries.  According to the UN ‘more workers have been forced into vulnerable employment and find themselves and their families living in extreme poverty’; ‘rising food prices have meant that progress to end hunger has been stymied in most regions’.  The neglect of the agricultural sector has resulted in ‘children in rural areas being nearly twice as likely to be underweight as those in urban areas’ and almost 1 billion people, worldwide, are still suffering from chronic hunger.  

As a result, DFID has been urged to increase its funding of agricultural research in order to increase smallholder food production.

According to IFAD, global poverty remains a massive and predominantly rural phenomenon – with 70 per cent of the developing world’s 1.4 billion extremely poor people living in rural areas.  Key areas of concern are Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

This means that future Development Goals should address the many factors that perpetuate the marginalisation of rural economies and lead to mass urbanisation:  Rural women, men and youth need to be able to participate in economic growth, and develop ways to better deal with risk.  Greater investment and attention are needed in infrastructure and utilities: particularly roads, electricity, water supply and renewable energy.  Also important are rural services, including education, health care, financial services, communication and information and communication technology services, which will turn rural areas from backwaters into places where the youth of today will want to live and will be able to fulfil their aspiration.