Investing in the Rural Poor A Challenge for the 21st Century.

Over the past half century; there has been a growing awareness that humankind is placing immense pressure on the earth's resources--land, water and atmosphere--in its quest for better living. At the dawn of this millennium, global natural resources and the ecological system are threatened and may even undermine the efforts to improve the nutritional and living standards of all people. Still valid a decade or more later is the report--Our Common Future--of the World Commission on Environment and Development, m which the Commissioners were categorical in their recommendation "that a new development path was required, one that sustained human progress not in a few places for a few years, but for the entire planet into the distant future".

The threat is real and the challenge is clear. Out of necessity and a desire to reap immediate gain, people and development programmes often have neglected available resources and instead actually increased the risk of greater deprivation. Development, especially for those who do not have enough to eat and in order to improve the living conditions of those who labour simply to obtain the basic necessities of life, must continue. But it must continue in a way that increases productivity and reduces poverty while maintaining and even enhancing the health of the resources upon which life depends. The only truly meaningful development is when it is an effectively sustainable development. Moreover, rural development can be sustained only if it is ecologically sound.

There is a need to crystallize perceptions about the crucial issues in order to sharpen the focus of domestic and international policies, if sustainable development is to be pursued in a meaningful manner. The quality of life for the rural poor depends primarily on the increased productivity of their labour and the continued fertility of the resources--and the two are inexorably linked.

Although the last decade has seen a proportionate decrease in the number of people in abject poverty, at the outset of the millennium there are more poor people in absolute numbers than the world has ever known. If the present trend continues, we will have a world divided by immense inequity, with the poorest regions falling further behind.

The present number -- 1.3 billion people living on less than a dollar a day--is momentarily constant, with the imminent danger that the figure could inflate with any complacency on the part of the rest of humanity. Yet, thoughtless action for immediate enhancement of production could be pyrrhic as the battle has to be fought on the fragile ecological surface of mother Earth.

Poverty kills over 11 million children a year. Malnutrition, the most extreme form of poverty, is implicated in over half of these deaths. But "poverty is man-made". It can therefore be largely unman-made. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan states: "The world has enough food. What it lacks is the political will to ensure that all people have access to this bounty, that all people enjoy food security." Today, poverty is a global concern that transcends ideology and immediate interest. It is as much a moral as a political challenge. Global stability is contingent upon global prosperity.

The tragedy is that the future need not be so bleak. We have the wealth--the world's 200 richest people more than doubled their wealth to $1 trillion in the four years to 1998; the assets of the top three billionaires are more than the combined gross national product of all least developed countries with their 600 million population--knowledge and resources exist to make the next millennium a more prosperous one for all. What is lacking is the vision and commitment to provide an equitable health service, clean water, a basic education system and a fair share of this world's resources to the poor. So long as every fifth inhabitant of our planet lives m absolute poverty, there can be no real stability in the world at large.

Development, which bypasses the rural poor and which proceeds at the expense of the environment, is more than shortsighted; it is a contradiction in terms. For unless it improves the lives of the most destitute, development becomes exploitation; unless it gives back to the earth as much as it takes, it becomes slow suicide.

The poor do not have the means to tackle the difficult problem of meeting food needs of today while at the same time preserving and restoring the natural resources for tomorrow. They do not need charity or words of sympathy, but support, in the form of appropriate policies, coherent programmes, material assistance, improved technologies and training. Nor can the problem be solved simply by planting trees, building irrigation canals and supplying fertilizers, as important as these are. The economic and social causes of poverty itself must also be addressed.

During the last decade, my country, Jordan, has achieved economic stability with sustainable growth. Inflation fell from double digits during the Persian Gulf crisis to the 2-5 per cent range today. Foreign debt has been reduced from 180 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) to about half. Unemployment, which reached 25 per cent in 1991, has decreased. The fiscal deficit has recently fallen from 18 percent of GDP to about 7 per cent. The agriculture sector currently contributes around 7 per cent of GDP, employs 7.4 per cent of the population, and accounts for 16 per cent of exports. It is therefore small, relative to the large service sector.

The pattern of agriculture has been shaped by the scarcity of water resources and poverty of land resources. About 450,000 hectares--5 per cent of the total area in Jordan--is used for cultivation, of which 75 per cent is rain-fed and 25 per cent is irrigated. In the upland rain-fed areas, the main crops are wheat, barley, lentils and chick-peas. In the valley, tomatoes and cucumbers are grown in greenhouses, as well as aubergines, citrus fruits, melon cabbage and bananas. In the livestock sector, the main successes have been poultry and egg production. Lack of grazing, due to degraded range lands (90 per cent of Jordan's total area) and the high cost of imported feed, means that only 30 per cent of red meat consumption is produced in the country. About 80 per cent of staple foods, mainly cereals, are grown in rain-fed areas. Livestock production, particularly small ruminants for meat and milk, is also carried out on dryland areas.

The majority of dryland farmers are smallholders and much more disadvantaged than those in irrigated areas. In spite of the comparative advantage of growing staple food and raising livestock in dryland areas in Jordan, the Government in the past three decades has emphasized the development of irrigated agriculture. A number of UN agencies have provided support to our efforts. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) strategy for development assistance to Jordan concentrates exclusively on the development of dryland farming, with special emphasis on integration of small ruminant production with field crop production in the high rainfall areas and the development of pasture and range in the low rain-fed areas.

It is the effectiveness of such organizations that has also contributed to Jordan's overall progress. To cite an example, an IFAD-supported project assisted 7,575 cooperative farm families (37, 625 people) in the northern parts of Jordan and increased the production of cereals, lentils, vegetables, milk, meat and wool; olive, grape and stone fruit production also increased as a result of this intervention.

The bounty of the earth is not inexhaustible. As it nourishes, so must it be nourished. If agriculture and rural development are to be sustainable--as they can be--ecological mechanisms must be understood and respected. We must learn to nurture and not undermine the efforts and aspirations of the poor and hungry, to nurture and not violate the natural resources upon which their livelihoods and lives depend.