1. Under what conditions can agriculture succeed in lifting people out of extreme poverty? Particularly those households with limited access to productive resources.
Agriculture in rural Africa bears striking similitude to the feudal system, where those with access to productive resources (land particularly) hire the services of those without access.
In some measure therefore, whatever is done to support those with access to productive resources will inevitably impact their workers who have no access to productive resources. However, since such laborers are in the minority and most of them nomadic, they usually get peanuts for their labors. Having a Union to demand for fairer wages could help them break free from the extreme poverty.
Also, if smallholder farmers get better prices for their products, it will impact the bottomline. So smallholder farmer cooperatives are suggested to press for fairer market prices and to check the activities of middlemen who might engage in sharp practices to shortchange smallholders.
Moreover, given the success of CCT in the Americas, agricultural conditions in addition to the three basic Human Development Indicators may be attached to Cash Transfers in Africa. However, since the basic input for agriculture is land (which is capital intensive), the governments of African nations have to be involved and land could be "given' to the extreme poor under what we may yet call Conditional Land Transfer (CLT).
Painfully, one of the greatest challenges to CCT or CLT in these parts is data. Therefore, my team and I are lobbying the government of our state towards the creation of a Statistics Bureau.
Finally, urban poverty has soared in my country over the last three years and shortly, we'll be proposing Conditional Property/Land Transfer to the government - a project in agriculture, located in the urban fringes, targeting the urban poor.
Thanks FAO, for all you do!
Mr. David Odili