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| Regional Priorities |
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Alleviating poverty in rice-based livelihood systems
Goal: livelihood systems that deliver sustained income growth and protect natural resources.
Rice-based livelihoods characterize rural Asia and the Pacific. Grown in 26 nations, rice is consumed as a staple food in most of the 43 regional member countries. It is sown over a fifth of the total arable and permanent cropland. The crop also gives part-time work to some 300 million people who make up a sixth of the total agricultural population.
Over the millennia, rice afforded sustainable, food-secure and even affluent lives in areas well endowed with land and water. But the present rice landscape is marred by factors and forces associated with food insecurity and environmental degradation, although it is recognized that rice-based systems also provide positive externalities. Problems include:
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declining farm sizes and falling rice prices; |
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the vicious cycle of rainfed production: low productivity, natural resource exploitation, and poverty in 40 percent of rice lands; |
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a significant proportion of the 503 million hungry people survive within rice-based farming systems; |
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climate change with the likelihood of coastal inundation, sea water seepage, erratic monsoonal precipitation, salinization and nutrient depletion as well as other damaging impacts will further threaten the productivity and sustainability of rice lands; and |
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the Uruguay Round Agreement and expected further trade liberalization threaten high-cost producers of rice. |
Within this context, a significant number of rice growers face bleak prospects in terms of employment, income generation and sustainability of resource endowments.
FAO's overall objective is to alleviate poverty and enhance incomes of farm households whose livelihoods were traditionally based on rice production.
Specific objectives are:
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to attain and maintain comparative advantages of diversified livelihood systems; |
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to realize relatively high incomes from productive, resilient and diversified farming systems, non- and off-farm employment, and industrial and service activities; and |
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to arrest and reverse natural resource degradation and environmental pollution. |
In perspective, this requires revisiting overall development plans with a view to reallocation of resources, including land amalgamation for more efficient management towards market-driven production, consumption and trade policies.
For more information on the six thematic programme areas guiding FAO's work in the region in its mission to help member countries halve the region's undernourished by 2015 see RAP Publication 2004/06 Towards a food-secure Asia and Pacific. Regional Strategic Framework for Asia and Pacific, second edition.
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