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
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
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.
I am pleased to have found your Blog. I am an Engineer and translator, by trade and an amateur and enthusiastic Geographer, hoping to make a small contribution toward the improvement of world hunger and other problems affecting the poor.
ReplyDeleteOur contribution (my wife and I) so far has been educating our four children about world problems (we have adopted a child from Guatemala), sponsoring another child, also in Guatemala and raising funds for an orphanage and a medical clinic in Guatemala. We have completed two short mission trips and exposed our children to different people, languages and cultures.
We also want to teach our children about geography. We are convinced that a global and cultural awareness is the basis to understand the world and its problems. Understanding the delicate interconnections between developed and developing countries, their economies and how the lives of the poor in Africa and Asia can affect our life and that of our children, is the first necessary step to take in order to try and solve global problems.
Our oldest daughter, now 13, is especially talented in this field and she has won the Colorado Geographic Bee State Championship (organized by National Geographic) two years in a row (2010 and 2011). She was 11th at the National Competition this year.
We have also started a website: www.geokid.org to try and bring geography education “to life” in schools around the United States, where geography knowledge and global awareness is often very poor!
Just a few days ago we watched the movie: Cool it. I found it very insightful. Although not directly addressed in the movie, it prompted me to think, among other things, about the issue of urbanization (and slums expansion) in developing nations and how we could help reverse the trend. Has enough money and time been spent to analyze how this trend could be slowed down or reversed? What if governments could offer incentives for new companies to open offices in smaller, more rural communities? What if financial and land ownership incentives, but also free seeds, housing, medical and simple perks like cell phones could be given to people to help them stay and work in the smaller communities they live in? Influencing large international bodies will always be very hard, but trying some ideas on a smaller scale, maybe in a small country with a receptive leadership, may be a way to determine the feasibility of alternatives to what has been tried so far.