People represent the core issue and an insight in to that issue provides a solid basis for identifying challenges and strategies for government institution and partnership building in support of agriculture and rural development. Developing countries within the Asia-Pacific region represent more than half of the world population today (a total of 3.7 billion out of 6.3 billion people in 2000), which continued to grow at 1.4% per year (1990-2000) slowing down to 0.7% per year in 2020-2025. The share of young people will decline from 29.1% in 2000 to 21.6% in 2025, while the share of working people will increase from 61.6% to 62.9% and of old age from 9.3% to 15.5%. The population in urban areas will increase from 37% to 51% during the same period.
Government policies towards poverty alleviation have been most successful in some large populated countries, like China and some smaller countries like Thailand. At the regional level overall poverty level has declined from 60% to less than 30% since the 1970s. Still the majority of the world’s poor live in this region, about 829 million out of a world total of 1.2 billion, living on an average of just one dollar a day. Out of a world total of 792 million under-nourished people (measured over the period 1996-98 and staying at virtually the same level as in 1995), a large majority live in this region, a total of 524 million chronically under-nourished. A disturbing feature of hunger in the region is that, despite the impressive relative decline in the share of the rural poor and the hungry, the absolute number of the poor and the hungry remains stubbornly at a Himalayan mountain high level.
Thus, formulating and implementing successful poverty alleviation policies to effectively reduce poverty in the region remains a major challenge and a core issue relevant to our discussion on the role of government institutions to promote agriculture and rural development. Poverty is the most dominant rural development dimension. Within this region about 80% of the poor and the hungry are living in rural areas and about 70% of the workforce depend for their livelihoods on income and employment opportunities in the agriculture, fisheries, forestry and livestock sectors. As an outcome of the Green Revolution, agriculture has in the last 35 years been the engine of broad based economic growth and overall development. The sector is expected to continue to play the central role in achieving sustainable food security and poverty alleviation through increasing the food production, improving productivity and quality, expanding non-farm employment and enhancing trade and overall capital formation.
Yet the impact of the Green Revolution is waning. Agricultural intensification through inappropriate farming systems has led in many agricultural areas to environmental degradation, erosion of top soils, depletion of soil fertility, declining water availability and pollution. The trend towards globalisation leading to opening of the national agricultural markets will force small scale farmers in Asia to meet new ecological and new technological challenges towards adapting their farming systems, collaboration in small and medium size agro-enterprise development including cooperatives, food quality control, specialisation in value added production from farm and or non farm activities, marketing information and networking, which will increasingly demand for higher levels of farm and or rural business management skills. Appropriate agricultural investment policies and pro poor pro small scale and medium level enterprise legislation which promote domestic fair trade conditions and local institution building will be needed to facilitate development of local market infrastructure and delivery of adequate production services to small-scale farmers and their (cooperative) SME’s, including appropriate small farmer production system based research and technology development, gender sensitive extension and on the job education, credit and skills training on rural enterprise development and management. The outcome of poverty alleviation strategies to promote farm and off-farm employment generation will further depend upon increasing public investment for development of appropriate rural-urban transport, physical infrastructure and information and production technologies, which are environmentally sustainable and provide increasing market opportunities for rural small scale producers, including small farmers, landless, indigenous and disabled peoples, in particular rural women.
Poverty is a holistic concept, which has both income and non-income components and includes entitlements within the households, community and beyond. Important is the concept of (in) equality, inequity and vulnerability to define poverty conditions for different groups of rural poor. For practical purposes it still makes sense for the concerned government agencies to focus on the number and proportion of the people falling under the absolute poverty line, which is an indicator of the extent of material deprivation, instead of on definitions based on inequality.
Throughout the region, poverty correlates in general with hunger and food insecurity. The distribution of undernourished people by sub region (1996-98) out of a total of 792 million is: South Asia 288 million, China and other Asia and Pacific countries 87 and 140 million respectively. According to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) rural poverty report 2000 for East and South Asia, poverty is particularly high in rural areas in the Philippines (rural 51.2% and urban 22.5% in 1997), Vietnam (57.2% and 25.9% in 1993), Bangladesh (39.8% and 14.3% in 1996), Cambodia (43.1% and 24.8% in 1997), and Papua New Guinea (39.4 and 13.5% in 1996). In India (34.2 and 27.9% in 1997) poverty levels are high but almost equally shared between rural and urban areas. In China poverty levels are at much lower in both rural and urban areas (4.6% and 2%). These poverty figures do not reflect the impact of the recent Asian economic crisis, which reversed the trend towards lower poverty levels in many Southeast Asian countries.
To a large extent, poverty is a gender issue. Asian rural women as small farmers and or as rural labourers represent the most vulnerable rural poor. This is mainly due to lack of access to assets and unequal control over monetary and non monetary resources at household level, lack of access to appropriate technologies, education and health, higher vulnerability during economic crisis. In most countries agricultural and rural development planners do not have gender sensitive data on distribution of poverty by region, sector and gender.
To meet the food needs of the increasing world population of a total of 8 billion in 2025, an additional 3 billion tons of cereals are needed, including rice, wheat and maize. World cereal production per ha has to increase from about 2.98 tons in 1997 to about 4.2 tons per ha in 2025 (based on the estimated 700 million ha for world cereal production). During 1990-97 the average increase in rice and wheat production per ha in the Asian region has been 1.2% and 3% per annum. Almost all countries in the region are rice growing and consuming as well - some 2600 million rice consumers. Yet the availability of cereals per capita, despite the enormous increase (24%) due to the Green Revolution between 1970 and 1995 is only 225 kg per capita in South Asia and 316 kg per capita in Southeast and East Asia, against the world average of 350 kg per capita in 1995.
While in recent decades there has been less famine in most Asian countries, malnutrition and under nourishment is still a serious problem. According to FAO definition, under nourishment is a situation where food intake is insufficient to meet the basic energy requirements on a continuing basis. No fewer than eleven of the seventeen rice producing countries in the region are classified by FAO as the most severe cases of "prevalence -plus" (?) category of hunger. In these countries the average calorie intake is only 60-65% of the official 2300 kcal/per person per day.
FAO has defined four dimensions of food insecurity:
1. Food availability (sufficient quantities of food supplied through domestic production, food aid or imports).
2. Food access (availability of quantity of food to individuals in terms of resources, income, common traditions or social policy entitlements). (?)
3. Food utilisation (quality of food basket for consumption determined by cultural, socioeconomic conditions of food diet, sanitation, clean water, etc)
4. Stability of access (exposure to high risks of loosing access to food like in the case of seasonal agricultural labourers, people in semi desert areas affected by natural disasters, erratic rainfall and general insecurity due to armed violence, etc).
The two main dimensions of food insecurity at household level are:
1. Transitory mainly due to income and savings shortfall, entitlement failure and acute bad health conditions.
2. Chronic mainly due to inadequate access to assets for food production or income generation including access to basic education and health services and intra household resource sharing.
