This report argues that land reform – both tenancy reform and redistribution of selling surplus lands to the landless – is important to poverty alleviation. In addition to production benefits, land reform helps to change the local political structure by giving more voice to the poor. Re-distributive land reform, whether through market-assisted land reform programmes or otherwise, should remain a substantive policy issue for poverty reduction. The chapter on agricultural productivity in this report points out the lack of progress in developing appropriate technologies for less favoured areas. There have been no technological breakthroughs for crops such as sorghum, millet, and cassava – the staple crops grown on marginal lands by poor people and mostly consumed by them. IFAD advocates more vigorous research in technologies that revive the productivity growth of staples in the marginal uplands and drylands. IFAD also recommends that the poor in these less-favoured areas need to be better informed in their judgements of the new technical change in seeds, fertilisers and land-water management aspects, through more regular open interaction with pro-poor scientists in the relevant topic areas. Such interaction should be in an open science environment subject to public, democratic control. As and when appropriate, IFAD promotes alternative and sustainable approaches based on a possible blending of indigenous farmers’ knowledge and modern practices. Well-informed public debate would also verify the claims of biotechnology to address the specific problems of poor farmers and marginal areas. The potential of sustainable or regenerative agriculture, as a unique way to boost returns from complex and diverse agricultural systems, is also to be explored. Non-farm sources of income are important for the rural poor in Asia, both because of landlessness or insufficient owned or tenanted land, and because of the highly seasonal nature of agricultural employment. The report discusses the case of China, where a rural development strategy focusing on the non-farm sector brought about a significant change in the structure of the economy. In addition to boosting the rural economy, this strategy increased farmers’ incomes and contributed to poverty reduction. The report also deals with the experiences of India in another non-farm arena, rural public works as an employment generation scheme for the rural poor.
The report discusses some examples from IFAD’s experience to demonstrate the potential of local governance and decentralization in rural poverty reduction. To decentralise, the critical problem of distributive conflicts and collective action must be dealt with. How do we ensure that the rural elites (mostly men) do not monopolize the benefits from decentralized resource management? Based on experiences from IFAD’s own projects, the report proposes measures of targeted and exclusive access of the poor, and women, to some portion of the devolved community resources, be they lakes or forests. These measures, to decentralize resources to the poor and develop them as common properties of the poor, increase the incomes of the poor. They enable higher investment, leading to increased productivity of the resources, even an improvement of their ecological condition. The sustainability of increased production is thus enhanced.
