Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition (FSN Forum)

Re: Eradicating extreme poverty: what is the role of agriculture?

Question No. 1

  1. By providing them the barren land that is no longer cultivated by the land owners. They can improve their living conditions by producing the food crops from the land.
  2. By providing credit facilities without or minimum rate of interest with the provision of conducting off-farm / livelihood activities.
  3. By generating employment opportunities to the family members of those households.
  4. By providing free education facilities to the children, and free medical facilities to the family members of the households.
  5. By providing opportunities of non-formal education to the households on different specially on social sector like health including reproductive health, nutrition, sanitation, and gender etc.

Question No. 2

Management of natural resources which are sustainable can have various roles in supporting the eradication or reduction of extreme poverty by accessing to the resources of the poor people. But the natural resources are varied country to country. In the case of Nepal forest, and water are major natural resources followed by land and mines. Community forestry owned by the community people are a good example to address the poverty situation of the communities in rural as well as in urban areas by accessing them to the forest.

Question No. 3

Partially yes. I cannot say that all the people from extreme poverty can find the pathways out of the sectors that are mentioned above. It depends upon the place (residing), time (rainy season, winter season) and some of the other factors like awareness, favourism in the community, and skilled or non-skilled too.

Question No. 4

Authorities should have the policies of food security in respect of eradication of poverty in rural areas as follows:

  1. Policy should be focused on availability of food whole of the year with increment in food production locally. Policy should be it that if the land owner does not do farming in the land it could be provided the land to the people from poverty sector without paying tenancy to the land owner.  

Accordingly policy should be addressed towards initiation in livestock activities like cattle or buffalo farming, goat raising, and birds raising and so on.  

  1. To be ensured access of poverty sector to the food.  They should have to eat the food without difficulties of infrastructure, and without shortage of money. For this purpose it would be applicable to take the policy of food rationing, and introduce the programme food for work.
  2. Increase awareness of the people for not wasting the foods rather to give to the hungry people before wasting the foods.

Question No. 5

There is no specific example with pin pointing in reduction of extreme poverty through an agricultural pathway. But it can be mentioned here that one of the reasons of reducing the rate of poverty in Nepal is due to the activities conducted based on agricultural pathways.