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食品教育和科技发展对于扶贫的作用
Food Education And Poverty Technologies For Poverty Alleviation Economics Essay
在过去二十年中，伴随着在食品生产方面扶贫政策的推出，南亚国家取得了显着的进步。这是由于贸易和投资改革，在这一地区促进经济增长的结果。尽管有这些变化，南亚只产生了2％的全球收入，但占有世界人口的22％，而占世界上的穷人人口44％。超过75％的人口直接或间接依靠农业维持生计。因此，农业必须在未来发挥大规模提高生产率和产品多样化的重要作用。由于南亚地区人口的不断升级和城市化加深，自然资源逐渐枯竭构成重大挑战。这些国家所面临的问题是复杂的，庞大的，其中主要的问题在于如何减少农业用地和非农业人口以及边际小块土地生产者，来满足人均土地供应减少和水资源稀缺，城市化和年轻人逃避传统农业的需求。
South Asian countries have made remarkable advances in food production accompanied by a dramatic reduction of poverty during the past two decades. This has been due to the result of trade and investment reforms, which have generated economic growth in this region. Despite these changes South Asia generates only 2% of the global income, yet supports 22% of the world’s population and 44% of the world’s poor. Over 75% of the population depend directly or indirectly on agriculture for their livelihoods. Therefore, agriculture will play a major role in the future and massive productivity increases and product diversification will be required. Due to escalating population and urbanization, natural resource are gradually depleting posing major challenges to reduce poverty in this region. The problems confronting these countries are complex and enormous of which the major issues are; declining agricultural land and agricultural population, marginal producers with small land holdings, decreasing per capita land availability, conflicting demands for scarce water resource, urbanization and youth evading traditional farming. This region will be required to produce food for larger and larger populations from less and lees land. The biggest challenge is how to increase output from the shrinking agricultural sector, while sustaining the productivity potential of the available natural resources.
The poverty is widespread in the region and there are over 800 million Asians living in abject poverty, nearly 20 million children are malnourished or undernourished. The levels of achievement of the Millennium Goals indicate that pervasive poverty yet haunts the South Asian countries. The most paradoxical situation is that some affluent Asians are enriching and changing diets while the many impoverished are scavenging. There is high-income disparity in these conflict engulfed countries and the purchasing power of the poor rural population is highly limited. The technologies have made a tremendous impact to improve the livelihoods of these people and even with a time lag they have benefited them. The technologies have benefited the rich than the poor, landed than the landless and men rather than women. The current globalisation is affecting all these countries and agriculture is getting commercialised.
Keywords: Poverty, Education, Alleviation
INTRODUCTION
In the past 20 years, South Asian countries have generated economic growth and strengthened their macro-economies by implementing production, trade and investment reforms. Despite of these changes, the total contribution of global trade has remained at 1%. South Asia also generates less than 2% of the world’s income, yet supports 22% of the world’s population and 44% of the world’s poor. Most of these people are dependant on agriculture for their livelihoods and survival. Approximately 60% of the Asian labour is involved in agriculture which accounts for about 25% of South Asia’s GDP. More than 2/3 of the rural population derive their livelihoods from land. To feed the increasing population adequately, it is estimated that food production has to double within the next 30 years. Meeting this demand will require massive productivity increases and product diversification to ensure broad based economic growth capable of improving the livelihoods of the poor. Therefore, agriculture and rural development should receive priority and policies and appropriate technologies will have to play a dominant role for the upliftment of living standards of the poor in this region.
Special characteristics of the region
The largest user of natural resources in this region is the agricultural sector. Unlike in the past natural resources base has been declining gradually due to population explosion in the region. Over 75% of the very poor live and work in rural areas and depend on agriculture for their livelihoods and this figure is as high as 91% in Nepal. Further demands on the resource base are evident due to urbanization as a result of trade liberalization and investments by the industrial sector. Future challenges to agricultural growth are immense and those challenges have to be faced if poverty is to be alleviated among these countries.
The constraints are many, of which the major issues are; declining agricultural land and agricultural population, land degradation and declining per capita land, both of which pose a major threat to future productivity. This region is characterized by a majority of small and marginal producers with land holding less than 0.3 ha. The small farm size is a dominant factor in agricultural production. As indicated earlier, farm size is very small and continues to decline under population pressure.
The decline in agricultural population is evident in all these countries, and the changes from 1988 – 1999 are as follows; Bangladesh 58.7-56.7%, India 56.3-55.4%, Nepal 93.3-93.1%, Pakistan 52.2-51.2% and Sri Lanka 47.2-46.6% (FAO 2000). In these countries urbanization is also taking place rapidly resulting in cities expanding into farmlands and fragmentation will continue. The per capita land will shrink further. The per capita land availability in these countries in 1998 was: Bangladesh 0.12, India 0.29, Nepal 0.14, Pakistan 0.28 and Sri Lanka 0.23 ha (FAO, 2000). This records a decline by 7.69%, 14.71%, 17.65% and 4.35% respectively, except Nepal which recorded zero declines from 1988. Up to 50% of the rural households are functionally landless.
Rising population, shrinking agricultural land, increasing demand on limited water resources, from the expanding industrial and urban sectors, widespread land degradation and inadequacy of governing infrastructure appear to be major concerns now than ever before. Water resource scarcity is a major constraint in all the countries of the region.
There is competitive demand for water by the domestic, agricultural and the industrial sectors. There is always a political desire to satisfy the domestic demand and the emerging industrial demands, while the agricultural demand becomes the least important. This has lead to serious mismatch between irrigation demand and supply. Excessive exploitation of ground water is causing falling water tables and underground aquifers are getting exhausted. The depletion of ground water now stands among the most serious concerns of Indian agriculture. Chadha (2002) states that in many parts of India the ground water level has gone many times lower so that the centrifugal tube well irrigation technology which was well within the means of the small farmers is beyond the investment capacity of even the larger farmers. For this reason, the larger states such as Punjab and Haryana which were the beneficiaries of the green revolution are now in the midst of crisis. Soil salinity is common in many such agricultural lands. These issues cannot be separated from poverty and food security. The challenge for the South Asian region is how to increase output from the agricultural sector while sustaining the productivity potential of the available agricultural resources.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Hazell (2001) suggests two public interventions to overcome any problems in the current agricultural growth. First are interventions to help the small farmers to capture the currently expanding markets, even within regions that have good infrastructure. In this case research must give adequate attention to the problems of the small holder farming and smallholders should be better reorganized for efficient marketing and input supply. Second are interventions to spread the benefits of new markets to less favoured areas where many of the poor farmers live. This requires long term economic investments and policy should be geared to such investments. If investments are not made in the less favoured areas, the people living in poverty in these areas are likely increase further in the future. Without adequate investment in infrastructure, technology and human development these areas are likely to deteriorate further. Technologies like to succeed in these areas are mixed farming systems; livestock and agro forestry, improved fallows, cover crops etc; due to poor and marginal soils, but access to markets have to be developed. Non farm activities in less favourable areas have high potential to alleviate poverty. In all cases marketing institutions need to be developed to support the smallholder farmers.
This literature review aims to map some of the issues to be explored by drawing on an annotated bibliography of over 100 documents related to the topic ‘communication of research for poverty reduction’. Conclusions and findings from the documents have been summarized in the literature review, which consists of four sections. The first section sets out the background and, more generally, some links between communication and poverty. Section 2 presents previous DFID material on communication of research, and compares it to material from other bilateral and multilateral agencies. Section 3 summarizes the major concerns and recommendations related to communication of research for poverty reduction in current literature from research institutes, think tanks, academics, NGOs and practitioners. The third section is divided into three sub-sections: communication to policy-makers, to researchers, and to end users. Finally, Section 4 discusses some of the gaps in the field and emerging themes that seem to be potentially important issues in the near future. |
