|
|
|
| May 6, 2005 | Friday | Rabi-ul-Awwal 26, 1426 |
ADB urges strategy for rural areas: Poverty reduction
ISLAMABAD, May 5: The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has asked the government to design a poverty reduction strategy focusing on education, skill development, job creation and healthcare in view of the relatively high incidence of poverty in the cotton/wheat zones of Punjab and Sindh.
“An explicit strategy is needed for the development of the rural non-agriculture sector, and is currently lacking in the government’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers as well as development plans,” maintains the bank.
In its latest working paper, Agriculture Growth and Rural Poverty, made available to Dawn, the bank asserted that agricultural growth without specific interventions targeting small farmers and rural non-farm households, might not alleviate poverty for much of the poor in rural Pakistan.
“Given that land distribution is highly skewed in these zones, it is necessary to concentrate more on income sources independent of land to reduce rural poverty. This suggests providing landless and small farmers with easy access to credit, technology, and information.”
Transitory poverty, the bank believes, can be reduced if policy interventions aim at levelling out income fluctuations.
A reduction in chronic poverty is possible through large and sustained growth in household incomes. For the former, the availability of micro-credit would be an effective tool, while for the latter, targeted public works programmes could help reduce chronic poverty.
“Poverty reduction is linked strongly to employment. The exploitation of labour in situations of poor governance, thin and inadequate labour markets is a major cause of increasing poverty.”
Rural real wages actually declined in Pakistan and there is no minimum wage protection in the rural sector.
The bank’s paper says that the legislative framework for the protection of workers does not apply to the agriculture sector. Thus, agricultural labour is deprived of benefits such as social security and old-age pension benefits.
“Minimum wage laws need to be set for the agriculture sector and all legislation, including workers’ protection and non-wage benefits, made applicable to the agriculture sector,” the bank said.
The government has followed an interventionist pricing policy for the agriculture sector. Although these pricing policies have been designed to favour small farmers, studies argue that they achieve the opposite. Such policies should be revised for the benefit of small farmers.
The available evidence, the bank maintains, also shows that increased resource degradation has led to declining productivity in agriculture. A comparison of Indian and Pakistani Punjab shows that higher productivity has been achieved in the former, mainly due to greater efforts to tackle resource degradation.
Finally, research on the linkages between agricultural growth, rural development, and poverty reduction requires more disaggregated data at various levels. It is necessary for the government to mobilise additional resources for data collection and to coordinate the existing sources of data collection to maximize synergies. These data gaps are also reflected in the gaps in existing and ongoing research.
The paper has suggested further research in key areas.
|
|
|
|
