From Poverty to Power Green, Oxfam 2008 - weman

FROM POVERTY TO POWERaltogether. Rural isolation is being eroded by the spread of roads,literacy, and communications. Farming communities are becomingincreasingly familiar with the urban world, whether from radio,television, or the stories of returning migrants. Increased ease ofmovement is blurring the boundary between rural and urban, asfamily members move between the two worlds, combining jobs andproduction into complex family livelihood strategies.Members of farming families work as labourers on neighbouringfarms, gather wild produce, raise or catch fish, produce crafts andother goods, or offer services such as carpentry or midwifery. In someof the world’s more arid areas, some 100–200 million largely nomadicpeople also live from herding livestock (the challenges facing pastoralistsare discussed in Part 4). Almost everywhere, farmers’ childrenleave the farm and head for the cities, sending back money to helptheir parents survive.Small wonder people are leaving. Rural households are not onlyincome-poor: literacy rates and life expectancy are consistently belownational averages, and school drop-out and infant mortality rates arehigher. Poor households in rural areas are particularly vulnerable toshocks, due to the vicissitudes of farming and the absence of buffermechanisms such as access to credit or insurance. When things gowrong, farmers and farm workers are usually on their own. As if thiswere not enough, in vast tracts of southern and eastern Africa, thescourge of HIV and AIDS has wiped out the working-age generationand its accumulated knowledge, leaving increasing numbers ofchild-headed households and fallow land. In Burkina Faso, a study oftwo villages found that HIV and AIDS had reduced income fromagriculture by 25–50 per cent. 19For the past two decades, aid donors and governments haveeffectively withdrawn from the countryside. Aid to agriculturedropped from 11.4 per cent of all aid in 1983–84 to 3.4 per cent in2004–05. 20 Between 1980 and 2004, spending on agriculture as a shareof total government expenditure fell in Africa (from 6.4 per cent to5 per cent), in Asia (14.8 per cent to 7.4 per cent), and in Latin America(8 per cent to 2.7 per cent). 21 Under ‘structural adjustment programmes’(SAPs), a radical free-market approach largely imposedon indebted countries by aid donors, the IMF, and the World Bank,120