The region is home to three-fourths of the world's agricultural
households. A large majority of them are very poor, mainly small and marginal
farmers with less than 2 hectares of land. others are small-scale coastal fisherfolk,
ethnic people in remote hilly areas, people in natural disaster-prone regions,
farmers with disabilities, and rural women. Yet, the region's high level of
rural poverty and hunger, which world leaders pledged to halve by 2015 under the
first
UN Millennium Development Goal, persist because of:
Lack of secure livelihoods for the marginalized rural poor
Declining public investment in agriculture and rural development
and changing attitudes towards small farmers
Top-down decision-making and lack of intersectoral planning
Trade liberalization and high-standard technology demands in
small-scale agriculture
Rural development priorities and programmes aim at institutional
capacity building for pro-poor, participatory, gender-sensitive and
sustainable agricultural and rural development planning, implementation,
monitoring and evaluation.
