The Epilogue to this publication might reiterate that within the Asian rice-based systems there are indeed many challenges and many opportunities as we strive to improve livelihoods - particularly for the poorest of the poor, for hungry children, and for adolescents expecting a brighter future.
On those persons' behalf, we might plead that the required investments are not immense, and that responsible interventions in agriculture and in rural development can help many poor riceland families to use their current assets and strengths to make their own way out of hunger and poverty.
FAO is well positioned to help initiate and support multi-stakeholder rural-livelihoods interventions. Through its sixteen priority areas for inter-disciplinary action - and through the five aggregations from among them that are expressly relevant to Asia's rice systems - FAO can contribute technical, social, economic, institutional, and livelihoods expertise and experience to multi-agency endeavours. To the extent that member countries and sponsors and partner agencies so wish, such interventions and endeavours can be associated with and provide strengthening to the national special programmes for food security.
Through such endeavours and interventions, the world can help provide to the disadvantaged children and adolescents a better quality of life than that experienced by their parents. Notably, immediate interventions can help ensure an adequate physical and mental development for undernourished pre-school children - of whom in East Asia there are 38 millions and in South Asia 86 millions. Crucially, appropriate investments made now may well obviate the need for a later and more-costly crisis management.
