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Wednesday, February 21, 2001 - Web posted at 7:00:07 AM GMT World behind on goal to halve poverty ROME - The international community's goal to halve global poverty by 2015 is failing and more aid is needed for the rural poor, a UN report said on Monday." Progress with poverty reduction in the last decade has been slow," the Rome-based United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) said in the document entitled Rural Poverty Report 2001. IFAD, one of three Rome-based UN food agencies, funds rural development programmes around the world." "The rate of poverty reduction in 1990-98 was less than one third of what is needed to halve extreme poverty during 1990-2015," added the IFAD report, presented ahead of the organisation's governing council this week. "It was six times less in sub-Saharan Africa." "The report said that aid for the rural poor - three-quarters of the 1. 2 billion people who survive on less than one dollar per day - had been declining in the 1990s, and urged the international community to boost aid." "If the target of reducing extreme poverty by half by 2015 is to be achieved, overall development assistance must be raised and the share going to agriculture should reflect its importance," it said. The Rome-based UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has also said that the international community is "way behind" on a separate target to halve world hunger by 2015. FAO plans a November summit to drum up political will to achieve the target.com PLACENCY WARNING IFAD officials warned that international donors were becoming complacent about cutting poverty after the successes of the so-called Green Revolution, which raised farm yields in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s." "There was a conviction that the Green Revolution had worked, so the feeling was, let's move on to the next issue," said Phrang Roy, IFAD's director for Asia and the Pacific." "We are not having great success (reducing rural poverty)," said Pietro Turilli, economist with IFAD's Near East and North Africa division. "The flow of funds for rural development is declining," he added. The report said that the real value of international aid fell sharply between 1987-88 and 1997-98." "The share of aid going to low-income or least-developed countries, which contain over 85 per cent of the poor, stayed around 63 percent and agricultural aid collapsed," it said. Vera Weill-Halle, director of IFAD's North American liaison office, said that the international community needed to work together to help the rural poor raise farm production, build agricultural infrastructure and implement new technologies." "IFAD cannot do this alone. We have to collaborate with other institutions," she told Reuters. IFAD was expected to hand out less than US$400 million in loans and grants for rural development projects this year, down from US$450-500 million last year, she said. The organisation hopes that when it seeks to replenish funds from international donor states next year, they will have woken up to the appalling plight of the rural poor, she added. IFAD said that the use of biotechnology in agriculture presented a vital opportunity to reduce poverty." "Genetically modified crops have the potential to reduce the poverty of the poor by increasing their supply of food from difficult land, but it is only with the full participation of civil society and institutions that the technology can be shared and applied," it said in a fact sheet distributed to reporters." "The effects of ignoring new approaches to poverty, nutrition, hunger and survival could be very damaging," it said. - Nampa-Reuters |
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