ROME: Agriculture ministers and top officials from 162 countries are gathering next week here to call on wealthy nations to do more to fight poverty as a mean towards ensuring peace and global security.

This is the message that will be sent by the 25th session of the Governing Council of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a specialized agency of the UN entrusted with fighting poverty and hunger in rural areas around the world.

IFAD president Lennart Bage said that industrialized countries must devote more effort and resources to combating poverty in rural areas if the global community is serious about building peace and security. Bage warns that ignoring this opportunity for action would be costly. “Today, there are more than 1.2 billion people living in conditions of extreme poverty, struggling for survival on less than one dollar per day.”

“Poverty on this scale is a source of civil strife and instability, disease and desperation. The consequences will not be constrained by national borders, but will present growing risks to the broader human society,” he said.

In the wake of the Sept 11 terror attacks, poverty gained attention because its global repercussions have become increasingly evident. However, wealthy countries are cutting rather than increasing aid to the poor, reports IFAD.

The UN agency reckons that hunger can only be defeated by attending to the needs of the rural population because, although there has been massive migration to the cities, three-quarters of the world’s poor live in the countryside.

IFAD reports that donors are neglecting the rural sector in most countries as foreign aid for agriculture was slashed by nearly 50 per cent between 1986 and 1999. The wealthy nations must remember that many resources were shifted towards security following the Sept 11 terror attacks, away from development assistance.

At the special session of the UN General Assembly held in New York in September 2000, the world’s leaders promised to step up efforts to reduce the number of people living in poverty by half in the next 15 years. But as time passes there seems to be little movement towards achieving that goal. And the poverty reduction rates recorded in the 1990s did not reach even a third of the pace necessary for cutting extreme poverty in half by 2015.—Dawn/InterPress Service.