Better livelihoods for poor people:
The role of Agriculture
In the year 2000 some 149 countries signed up to the Millennium Development Goals the foremost of which is the elimination of extreme poverty and hunger. That year we produced our Target Strategy Paper on Halving World Poverty by 2015: economic growth, equity and security, which set out our approach to increasing the economic well-being of poor people. In May this year we published Eliminating Hunger, our strategy for achieving the Millennium Development Goal on hunger.
In it we show how hunger is inextricably linked to poverty and vulnerability. Measures to reduce poverty, empower people and create an environment within which markets can work fairly are essential to improve access to food.This paper on Agriculture looks at a subject that can play an important part in tackling poverty and hunger. This is because three quarters of the world’s poorest people (the 1.2 billion living on less than a dollar a day) live in rural areas with their livelihoods one way or another dependent on agriculture. Agriculture provides more than food. It contributes to economic growth, to better livelihoods and to provision of environmental services important to poor people in urban and rural areas.
This paper focuses on agriculture’s role in poverty elimination and providing better livelihoods for poor people. It asks what lessons we have learned and what are the challenges.
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Improving livelihoods for the poor: the role of literacy
This Background Briefing examines the way in which literacy features in different sectoral programmes supported by DFID. Although the development of literacy skills is an essential part of our commitment to Universal Primary Education (UPE), improving literacy practice for adults continues to be an integral part of many different
programmes, such as transport, water, health, small business development, environment, livelihoods, and governance.
"In recent decades, it is those countries which have seized the opportunity
offered by more open world markets to increase exports and attract inward
investment that have made the greatest strides in reducing poverty."
Speech by Clare Short, Ministerial Roundtable on Trade and Least Developed
Countries, London, 19 March 2001.
(A speech by Clare Short, Secretary of State for International Development
UK Bushmeat Campaign Conference at The Zoological Society of London
28 May 2002)
Before I come to the question of bushmeat, it is important that I
make clear the reason for my Department’s engagement in this issue and the perspective we bring to this work.
One in five of the six billion people who share our planet are living in abject
poverty. Most of them are eking out their existence in difficult marginal
environments with few government services, particularly health and education.
They live a life subject to constant malnutrition and disease and are constantly vulnerable to economic and environmental shocks. They and their children struggle to survive and despite working harder and more creatively than most other people on the planet they have fewer opportunities to improve their lives or hope that their children will live to see a better future.
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