Agrifood systems offer a direct path to cutting poverty ahead of 2030

A new brief from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) points to agrifood systems as one of the most direct levers available for reducing poverty.

With full appreciation for the integrated, indivisible and interlinked nature of the Sustainable Development Goals, the publication, FAO and SDG 1: End poverty in all its forms everywhere, sets out where the world stands on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 1 and where agrifood systems transformation can still accelerate progress before 2030. Households in extreme poverty are often concentrated in rural areas and engaged in agricultural work, it notes, meaning investment in the sector reaches them directly.

The global extreme poverty rate has dropped below its pre-pandemic level, with an estimated 570 000 fewer people living in extreme poverty in 2024 than in 2019, according to the brief. That gain sits against a total of 831 million people still below the extreme poverty line in 2025. Without faster progress, the UN Systems warns 8.9 percent of the global population will still be in extreme poverty by 2030, missing the SDG 1 target. Poverty and hunger go hand in hand, so gains in agrifood systems can support progress on both goals at once, while shocks such as conflict and climate extremes tend to hit both together.

FAO's own work on poverty reduction is structured around the FAO Framework on Rural Extreme Poverty, launched in 2019. The framework sets out four areas of action.

• The first is food security and nutrition, including making the links between poverty and hunger explicit and promoting the right to adequate food.
• The second is economic inclusion, strengthening agrifood systems' contribution to poverty reduction through sustainable, equitable growth and living incomes. The brief is candid that agrifood transitions can also raise costs or exclude producers who cannot meet new production or certification standards without support.
• The third is environmental sustainability and resilience for rural livelihoods, integrating poverty reduction into climate action. According to FAO's The unjust climate, poor rural households already face significant income losses compared with better-off households when floods or heat stress hit, with each widening the rural income gap by around USD 20 billion a year. The brief cautions that transition costs fall hardest on the poor if they are not managed deliberately.
• The fourth is preventing and building resilience against risks and shocks, through rights-based approaches and innovation.

To support this work, FAO points to the Technical Network on Poverty Analysis (THINK-PA), set up in 2019 to connect practitioners working on poverty data and policy, and the Rural Livelihoods Information System (RuLIS), developed with the World Bank and the International Fund for Agricultural Development, which standardizes income data across countries and supports estimates of Living Income Gaps. The Rural Multidimensional Poverty Index adds measures of poverty beyond income.

To accelerate progress, FAO identifies four areas of action: just transitions that support smallholders and low-income consumers as agriculture adapts to climate goals; economic inclusion through jobs and technologies that bring more women into the labour force; gender-transformative approaches that address the structural roots of inequality rather than its symptoms; and stronger land tenure security for the rural poor, including through its integration into social protection and agricultural policies.

None of this closes the gap alone, as the publication notes. Conflict, economic instability and climate change are working against poverty reduction in many of the same places agrifood investment is most needed, particularly sub-Saharan Africa and the Sahel, where up to 80 percent of the population lives in extreme poverty. Given however that many of these populations depend on agriculture, investments in agrifood systems transformation can play an important role in accelerating poverty reduction.