''The failure stems in large part from a misconception that the main poverty problem has moved from the countryside to the burgeoning megacities of the developing world,'' says IFAD President Fawzi Hamad Al-Sultan.

Seventy-five percent of the world's poorest people, he points out, live in rural areas, most of whom make their living in farming or farm labour. As this figure is expected to drop only to about 60 percent by 2020, a focus on rural poverty and agricultural development is crucial to the reduction of poverty overall, he argues.

At a Millennium Summit of world leaders last September, 100 heads of state and 48 heads of government pledged to halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of the world's people living in abject poverty, and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.

But according to current UN estimates, the poorest of the world's poor - about 1.3 billion people living on less than a dollar a day - is expected to keep growing. By the next decade, the number of people living in extreme poverty may even rise to about 1.5 billion out of a global population of more than 6 billion people. And by 2015, the UN predicts, the number could rise even higher, to 1.9 billion - provided there are no concerted efforts to fight poverty globally.

In a foreword to a new 266-page report titled 'Rural Poverty Report 2001' released Monday, Al-Sultan points out that one of the key reasons for this projected failure is the marginalisation of the rural poor and the agricultural sector.

''The declining support for agriculture is extremely damaging to efforts to reduce poverty and hunger,'' he says, adding that the rural poor depend primarily on agriculture and related activities for their livelihood.

It would seem natural, he says, that to have a substantial effect on poverty, domestic investment and external assistance alike should focus on agriculture, the basis of their survival, and on rural areas where the poor live.

''But the poor and the rural rarely have the same voice in decision-making as the better-off and the urban,'' he notes.

The IFAD president also points out that official development assistance (ODA) going to agriculture has fallen, from about 20 percent in the late 1980s to about 12 percent today. Assistance to agriculture from international financial institutions has followed a similar path.

According to IFAD, the extremely poor spend almost three-quarters of their income on food. They receive over two-thirds of their calories from staples and earn perhaps half of their income from growing them. ''So the control of farmland by the poor tends to be a safeguard against poverty,'' the report says.

Al-Sultan points out that during the 1970s and most of the 1980s, food staple yields rose sharply and poverty declined rapidly. But in the 1990s, on the other hand, food staple yield growth slowed down substantially, as did the rate of poverty decline.

''This neglect of agriculture, in terms of both international development co-operation and domestic resource allocation, must be redressed if we hope to achieve the challenging poverty targets of the Millennium Summit,'' he adds.

Cutting world poverty in half requires a focus on reviving agricultural development and responding to the needs of rural populations.

But improving the welfare of the rural poor depends on their empowerment through access to productive resources - such as land, water, knowledge, technology and capital - in order to seize opportunities in the market.

According to IFAD, allocating resources to the rural and the poor will not compromise economic growth. Since the economies of developing countries and their labour supplies are overwhelmingly dependent on the agricultural sector, such investments can only accelerate growth.

''Underlying all these themes is the fact that labour-intensive approaches are especially appropriate to rural poverty reduction,'' says Al- Sultan. ''Capital is always scarce in low-income countries. Developing countries have high ratios of labour to capital. Therefore, they can gain more from market liberalisation if they encourage labour-intensive production.''

Since poverty has many dimensions, says the report, efforts to reduce it must be multi-targeted. The report details four dimensions of poverty that it says are of critical importance for understanding the challenges facing rural poverty reduction.

First, food staples retain a critical role in the livelihoods of the rural poor who spend most of their time growing them. Second, reducing rural poverty requires better allocation and distribution of water to the rural poor. Nearly 350 million rural poor live in dryland areas already suffering from severe water stress.

Third, achieving the poverty reduction target requires a conscious effort to increase the share of the rural poor in resources. Fourth, particular groups, especially women, merit special attention. Poor rural women and girls need to be targeted by policies, as they constitute the majority of the rural poor whose poverty is often reinforced through cultural and/or legal obstacles.

Copyright 2001 IPS

###