The causes of rural poverty are complex and multidimensional. They involve, among other things, culture, climate, gender, markets, and public policy. Likewise, the rural poor are quite diverse both in the problems they face and the possible solutions to these problems.
This essay examines how rural poverty develops, what accounts for its persistence, and what specific measures can be taken to eliminate or reduce it.
Broad economic stability, competitive markets, and public investment in physical and social infrastructure are widely recognised as important requirements for achieving sustained economic growth and a reduction in rural poverty. In addition, because the rural poor's links to the economy vary considerably, public policy should focus on issues such as their access to land and credit, education and health care, support services, and entitlements to food through well-designed public works programmes and other transfer mechanisms.
About one-fifth of the world's population is afflicted by poverty - these people live on less than $1 a day. Poverty is not only a state of existence but also a process with many dimensions and complexities. Poverty can be persistent (chronic) or transient, but transient poverty, if acute, can trap succeeding generations. The poor adopt all kinds of strategies to mitigate and cope with their poverty.
To understand poverty, it is essential to examine the economic and social context, including institutions of the state, markets, communities, and households. Poverty differences cut across gender, ethnicity, age, location (rural versus urban), and income source. In households, children and women often suffer more than men.
In the community, minority ethnic or religious groups suffer more than majority groups, and the rural poor more than the urban poor; among the rural poor, landless wage workers suffer more than small landowners or tenants. These differences among the poor reflect highly complex interactions of cultures, markets, and public policies.
Rural poverty accounts for nearly 63 percent of poverty world-wide, reaching 90 percent in some countries like Bangladesh and between 65 and 90 percent in sub-Saharan Africa. (Exceptions to this pattern are several Latin American countries in which poverty is concentrated in urban areas.) In almost all countries, the conditions - in terms of personal consumption and access to education, health care, potable water and sanitation, housing, transport, and communications - faced by the rural poor are far worse than those faced by the urban poor.
Persistently high levels of rural poverty, with or without overall economic growth, have contributed to rapid population growth and migration to urban areas. In fact, much urban poverty is created by the rural poor's efforts to get out of poverty by moving to cities. Distorted government policies, such as penalising the agriculture sector and neglecting rural (social and physical) infrastructure, have been major contributors to both rural and urban poverty.
The links between poverty, economic growth, and income distribution have been studied quite extensively in recent literature on economic development.
ABSOLUTE POVERTY CAN BE ALLEVIATED IF AT LEAST TWO CONDITIONS ARE MET:
-- economic growth must occur - or mean income must rise - on a sustained basis; and
-- economic growth must be neutral with respect to income distribution or reduce income inequality.
Generally, poverty cannot be reduced if economic growth does not occur. In fact, the persistent poverty of a substantial portion of the population can dampen the prospects for economic growth. Also, the initial distribution of income (and wealth) can greatly affect the prospects for growth and alleviation of mass poverty.
Substantial evidence suggests that a highly unequal distribution of income is not conducive to either economic growth or poverty reduction. Experience has shown that if countries put in place incentive structures and complementary investments to ensure that better health and education lead to higher incomes, the poor will benefit doubly through increased current consumption and higher future incomes.
The pattern and stability of economic growth also matter. On the one hand, traditional capital-intensive, import-substituting, and urban-biased growth - induced by government policies on pricing, trade, and public expenditure - has generally not helped alleviate poverty. On the other hand, agricultural growth - where there is a low concentration of land ownership and labour-intensive technologies are used - has almost always helped reduce poverty. Finally, sharp drops in economic growth - resulting from shocks and economic adjustments - may increase the incidence of poverty. Even when growth resumes, the incidence of poverty may not improve if inequality has been worsened by the crisis.
THE RURAL POOR: WHO ARE THEY?
The rural poor depend largely on agriculture, fishing, forestry, and related small-scale industries and services. To understand how poverty affects these individuals and households, and to delineate the policy options for poverty reduction, we first need to know who the rural poor are.
The rural poor are not a homogeneous group. One important way to classify the rural poor is according to their access to agricultural land: cultivators have access to land as small landowners and tenants, and noncultivators are landless, unskilled workers. There is, however, much functional overlap between these groups, reflecting the poverty-mitigating strategies of the poor in response to changes in the economy and society.
Cultivators, who form the bulk of the rural poor in developing countries, are directly engaged in producing and managing crops and livestock. Since these households cannot sustain themselves on the small parcels of land they own or cultivate, they provide labour to others for both farm and nonfarm activities inside and outside their villages.
Some members of these households migrate to towns or cities on either a rotational or a long-term basis. In many countries, both small landowners and tenants are under increasing pressure to get out of the agriculture sector altogether. Underlying this process of "depeasantization" are market forces and policies affecting landholdings, rents, prices, credit, inputs, and public investment in social and physical infrastructure.
Non-cultivators are perhaps the poorest among the rural poor. Their numbers have been rising rapidly because of the natural increase in population and depeasantization.
These workers depend on seasonal demand for labour in agriculture and in rural informal, small-scale industries and services. The landless rural workers are vulnerable to fluctuations in the demand for labour, wage rates, and food prices. They find it even more difficult than small landowners and tenants to gain access to public infrastructure and services. In addition, unlike their counterparts in urban areas, they are often excluded from public sector safety nets (food rations, for example).
Rural women tend to suffer far more than rural men. Their poverty and low social status in most societies is a major contributor to chronic poverty. Substantial evidence from many countries shows that focusing on the needs and empowerment of women is one of the keys to human development.
WHAT DO THE POOR OWN?
To understand poverty creation in rural areas and its effects on different groups, we need to look at the assets that the poor own or to which they have access, and their links to the economy. The economic conditions faced by the rural poor are affected by a variety of assets (and the returns on them) held at the household, community, and supra-community levels. The poor's physical assets include natural capital (private and common property rights in land, pastures, forest, and water), machines and tools and structures, stocks of domestic animals and food, and financial capital (jewellery, insurance, savings, and access to credit).
Their human assets are the labour pools - comprising workers of varying ages, genders, skills, and health - in the households and communities. Their infrastructural assets are publicly and privately provided transport and communications, access to schools and health centers, storage, potable water, and sanitation.
Their institutional assets include their legally protected rights and freedoms and the extent of their participation in decision making in households and communities, as well as at the supra-community level. The first two categories of assets are largely regulated through formal and informal networks among individuals and communities. Most rural people, particularly women and those in landless households, are greatly handicapped by inadequate assets and the low and volatile returns on them.
The differences among the rural poor are more clearly reflected in their links to the economy, which determine how they use their assets and participate in production. All of the rural poor are engaged in the production of both tradable and nontradable goods and services. Artisans and unskilled workers provide many nontradable services and some nontradable products (such as staple foods) that small cultivators also produce.
Only cultivators, however, have access to small parcels of land through ownership or (sharecropping) tenancy. They are also the only groups of poor people who own or rent physical capital such as tools, implements, and machinery. Artisans and small-scale farmers have only limited amounts of physical capital. They have only limited access to financial capital and acquire it largely through informal agents or institutions, except for tenants, who can use their landlords as conduits to formal credit.
Borrowed capital is often costly and is used to maintain consumption during hard times or to buy supplies and equipment needed for farming. Households' labour is used both within the family - for work done by unpaid family members - and to earn the wages paid to landless, unskilled workers in farm and nonfarm activities.
All groups of the rural poor are vulnerable to serious risk owing to changes in weather, health, markets, investment, and public policy. The resulting fluctuations in the prices and quantities of their assets and of what they produce can either deepen their poverty or give them opportunities to escape from it. The main reason is that the rural poor have a very low capacity to absorb abrupt financial shocks. In addition, economic crises and natural disasters can bring about sharp increases in poverty and make it more difficult for the poor to escape it.
HOW RURAL POVERTY IS CREATED:
Numerous characteristics of a country's economy and society, as well as some external influences, create and perpetuate rural poverty:
-- political instability and civil strife;
-- systemic discrimination on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, or caste;
-- ill-defined property rights or unfair enforcement of rights to agricultural land and other natural resources;
-- high concentration of land ownership and asymmetrical tenancy arrangements;
-- corrupt politicians and rent-seeking public bureaucracies;
-- economic policies that discriminate against or exclude the rural poor from the development process and accentuate the effects of other poverty-creating processes;
-- large and rapidly growing families with high dependency ratios;
-- market imperfections owing to high concentration of land and other assets and distortionary public policies; and
-- external shocks owing to changes in the state of nature (for example, climatic changes) and conditions in the international economy.
Biases in national economic and social policies can contribute to rural poverty by excluding the rural poor from the benefits of development and accentuating the effects of other poverty-creating processes.
POLICY BIASES THAT GENERALLY WORK AGAINST THE RURAL POOR INCLUDE:
-- urban bias in public investment for infrastructure and provision of safety nets;
-- implicit taxation of agricultural products through so-called support prices and an overvalued exchange rate;
-- direct taxation of agricultural exports and import subsidies;
-- subsidies for capital-intensive technologies;
-- favouring export crops over food crops; and
-- bias in favour of large landowners and commercial producers with respect to rights of land ownership and tenancy, publicly provided extension services, and access to (subsidised) credit. These policies can have both short and long-term effects on the rural poor. The effects are particularly significant in the context of the structural adjustment programs that many developing countries have undertaken to restore macroeconomic stability and expand the capacity of the economy to increase production, employment, and incomes.
(To be continued)
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