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食品教育和科技发展对于扶贫的作用
Food Education And Poverty Technologies For Poverty Alleviation Economics Essay
在过去二十年中，伴随着在食品生产方面扶贫政策的推出，南亚国家取得了显着的进步。这是由于贸易和投资改革，在这一地区促进经济增长的结果。尽管有这些变化，南亚只产生了2％的全球收入，但占有世界人口的22％，而占世界上的穷人人口44％。超过75％的人口直接或间接依靠农业维持生计。因此，农业必须在未来发挥大规模提高生产率和产品多样化的重要作用。由于南亚地区人口的不断升级和城市化加深，自然资源逐渐枯竭构成重大挑战。这些国家所面临的问题是复杂的，庞大的，其中主要的问题在于如何减少农业用地和非农业人口以及边际小块土地生产者，来满足人均土地供应减少和水资源稀缺，城市化和年轻人逃避传统农业的需求。
South Asian countries have made remarkable advances in food production accompanied by a dramatic reduction of poverty during the past two decades. This has been due to the result of trade and investment reforms, which have generated economic growth in this region. Despite these changes South Asia generates only 2% of the global income, yet supports 22% of the world’s population and 44% of the world’s poor. Over 75% of the population depend directly or indirectly on agriculture for their livelihoods. Therefore, agriculture will play a major role in the future and massive productivity increases and product diversification will be required. Due to escalating population and urbanization, natural resource are gradually depleting posing major challenges to reduce poverty in this region. The problems confronting these countries are complex and enormous of which the major issues are; declining agricultural land and agricultural population, marginal producers with small land holdings, decreasing per capita land availability, conflicting demands for scarce water resource, urbanization and youth evading traditional farming. This region will be required to produce food for larger and larger populations from less and lees land. The biggest challenge is how to increase output from the shrinking agricultural sector, while sustaining the productivity potential of the available natural resources.
The poverty is widespread in the region and there are over 800 million Asians living in abject poverty, nearly 20 million children are malnourished or undernourished. The levels of achievement of the Millennium Goals indicate that pervasive poverty yet haunts the South Asian countries. The most paradoxical situation is that some affluent Asians are enriching and changing diets while the many impoverished are scavenging. There is high-income disparity in these conflict engulfed countries and the purchasing power of the poor rural population is highly limited. The technologies have made a tremendous impact to improve the livelihoods of these people and even with a time lag they have benefited them. The technologies have benefited the rich than the poor, landed than the landless and men rather than women. The current globalisation is affecting all these countries and agriculture is getting commercialised.
Keywords: Poverty, Education, Alleviation
INTRODUCTION
In the past 20 years, South Asian countries have generated economic growth and strengthened their macro-economies by implementing production, trade and investment reforms. Despite of these changes, the total contribution of global trade has remained at 1%. South Asia also generates less than 2% of the world’s income, yet supports 22% of the world’s population and 44% of the world’s poor. Most of these people are dependant on agriculture for their livelihoods and survival. Approximately 60% of the Asian labour is involved in agriculture which accounts for about 25% of South Asia’s GDP. More than 2/3 of the rural population derive their livelihoods from land. To feed the increasing population adequately, it is estimated that food production has to double within the next 30 years. Meeting this demand will require massive productivity increases and product diversification to ensure broad based economic growth capable of improving the livelihoods of the poor. Therefore, agriculture and rural development should receive priority and policies and appropriate technologies will have to play a dominant role for the upliftment of living standards of the poor in this region.
Special characteristics of the region
The largest user of natural resources in this region is the agricultural sector. Unlike in the past natural resources base has been declining gradually due to population explosion in the region. Over 75% of the very poor live and work in rural areas and depend on agriculture for their livelihoods and this figure is as high as 91% in Nepal. Further demands on the resource base are evident due to urbanization as a result of trade liberalization and investments by the industrial sector. Future challenges to agricultural growth are immense and those challenges have to be faced if poverty is to be alleviated among these countries.
The constraints are many, of which the major issues are; declining agricultural land and agricultural population, land degradation and declining per capita land, both of which pose a major threat to future productivity. This region is characterized by a majority of small and marginal producers with land holding less than 0.3 ha. The small farm size is a dominant factor in agricultural production. As indicated earlier, farm size is very small and continues to decline under population pressure.
The decline in agricultural population is evident in all these countries, and the changes from 1988 – 1999 are as follows; Bangladesh 58.7-56.7%, India 56.3-55.4%, Nepal 93.3-93.1%, Pakistan 52.2-51.2% and Sri Lanka 47.2-46.6% (FAO 2000). In these countries urbanization is also taking place rapidly resulting in cities expanding into farmlands and fragmentation will continue. The per capita land will shrink further. The per capita land availability in these countries in 1998 was: Bangladesh 0.12, India 0.29, Nepal 0.14, Pakistan 0.28 and Sri Lanka 0.23 ha (FAO, 2000). This records a decline by 7.69%, 14.71%, 17.65% and 4.35% respectively, except Nepal which recorded zero declines from 1988. Up to 50% of the rural households are functionally landless.
Rising population, shrinking agricultural land, increasing demand on limited water resources, from the expanding industrial and urban sectors, widespread land degradation and inadequacy of governing infrastructure appear to be major concerns now than ever before. Water resource scarcity is a major constraint in all the countries of the region.
There is competitive demand for water by the domestic, agricultural and the industrial sectors. There is always a political desire to satisfy the domestic demand and the emerging industrial demands, while the agricultural demand becomes the least important. This has lead to serious mismatch between irrigation demand and supply. Excessive exploitation of ground water is causing falling water tables and underground aquifers are getting exhausted. The depletion of ground water now stands among the most serious concerns of Indian agriculture. Chadha (2002) states that in many parts of India the ground water level has gone many times lower so that the centrifugal tube well irrigation technology which was well within the means of the small farmers is beyond the investment capacity of even the larger farmers. For this reason, the larger states such as Punjab and Haryana which were the beneficiaries of the green revolution are now in the midst of crisis. Soil salinity is common in many such agricultural lands. These issues cannot be separated from poverty and food security. The challenge for the South Asian region is how to increase output from the agricultural sector while sustaining the productivity potential of the available agricultural resources.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Hazell (2001) suggests two public interventions to overcome any problems in the current agricultural growth. First are interventions to help the small farmers to capture the currently expanding markets, even within regions that have good infrastructure. In this case research must give adequate attention to the problems of the small holder farming and smallholders should be better reorganized for efficient marketing and input supply. Second are interventions to spread the benefits of new markets to less favoured areas where many of the poor farmers live. This requires long term economic investments and policy should be geared to such investments. If investments are not made in the less favoured areas, the people living in poverty in these areas are likely increase further in the future. Without adequate investment in infrastructure, technology and human development these areas are likely to deteriorate further. Technologies like to succeed in these areas are mixed farming systems; livestock and agro forestry, improved fallows, cover crops etc; due to poor and marginal soils, but access to markets have to be developed. Non farm activities in less favourable areas have high potential to alleviate poverty. In all cases marketing institutions need to be developed to support the smallholder farmers.
This literature review aims to map some of the issues to be explored by drawing on an annotated bibliography of over 100 documents related to the topic ‘communication of research for poverty reduction’. Conclusions and findings from the documents have been summarized in the literature review, which consists of four sections. The first section sets out the background and, more generally, some links between communication and poverty. Section 2 presents previous DFID material on communication of research, and compares it to material from other bilateral and multilateral agencies. Section 3 summarizes the major concerns and recommendations related to communication of research for poverty reduction in current literature from research institutes, think tanks, academics, NGOs and practitioners. The third section is divided into three sub-sections: communication to policy-makers, to researchers, and to end users. Finally, Section 4 discusses some of the gaps in the field and emerging themes that seem to be potentially important issues in the near future.#p#分页标题#e#
RESEARCH GOALS
The Millennium Development Goals adopted by 189 countries in 2000 serves as a bench mark on the strategic efforts pursued by different countries for the reduction of poverty. It is necessary to examine the levels of achievement of the 7 goals by different countries in South Asia in poverty the reduction. Recently, Asiff Hussein, UNDP (2003) reported on these issues as follows:
Eradicating extreme poverty, Millennium Goal 1, by halving between 1990 – 2015, the proportion of people whose incomes are less than one dollar a day. In this regard the performance of the South Asian countries have been highly variable; the proportion of the population living on one dollar a day in Sri Lanka was 6.6 which compares favourably with the rest of South Asia, Pakistan 13.4, India 34.7, Bangladesh 36.0 and Nepal 37.7. It is noted that the last three countries, India, Bangladesh and Nepal yet have over one third of their populations at high poverty level ( UNICEF,2003).
Goal 2, Universal primary education by ensuring that children every where irrespective of their sex will be able to complete a full course of primary education. The literacy rates have increased since 1990 in all countries of the region (Table 1 ). In 2001 the youth literacy (ages between 15-24 years) rate in Sri Lanka was 96.9%, which compares well with India 73.3%, Nepal 61.1%, Pakistan 57.8% and Bangladesh 49.1% (UNDP, 2003). The above 15 year literacy rates in 2001 were much lower in three countries, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan (40.6- 44.0) compared with India (58.0) and Sri Lanka (91.9). In Sri Lanka, high literacy rates have been attributed to the government policy on free education up to university level since independence. In Nepal the situation is different, although the primary education is free attendance decline in the higher classes as children are expected to help the parents at home and field (UNICEF, 2003).
Goal 3 is in relation to gender equality and empowering women, Sri Lanka had a ratio of 0.94 girls to boys in primary education and 1.03 in secondary education in 2000, which also compares well with Bangladesh 0.96 and 0.99, Nepal 0.79 and 0.69, India 0.77 and 0.66, and Pakistan 0.55 and 0.63. The ratio of literate females to males in Sri Lanka was 1.00, compared with India 0.82, Bangladesh 0.71, Pakistan 0.60 and Nepal 0.57. The representation in the country’s legislature was highest in Pakistan 22%, in the other countries it varied between 2-6%, lowest in Bangladesh (2%). Education or human capital enhancement is crucial for poverty alleviation which has been emphasised by many authors ( Chatham, 2002;Dasgupta,1989).
DATA INTERPRETATION
The Human Development Index (HDI) an index of adult literacy rate, life expectancy at birth and per capita income is also highly variable in the region, highest in Sri Lanka 0.730, India 0.590, Bangladesh 0.502, and Nepal 0.499 and Pakistan 0.499. The life expectancies at birth ranges from 72 years in Sri Lanka to 59 years in Nepal. The per capita incomes also vary widely, Bangladesh 370 US$, India 470 US$, Nepal 250 US$, Pakistan 420 US$ and Sri Lanka 830 US$ The access to safe water and adequate sanitation follows a similar pattern (Table 1). The figures above are some indication of the status of poverty prevailing in the region. Despite these efforts, there is a wide gap between the reality and promise. If the trends in statistical information are any indication of the poverty alleviation, taking into consideration the above figures it is seen that Sri Lanka is well ahead of the other South Asian countries. However, Sri Lanka still faces severe economic difficulties that have the strongest impact on the rural poor communities.
South Asia has made a remarkable transition from food deficits in 1960s to national food surpluses accompanied by a dramatic reduction in poverty. The production of major staples in the region during 1996-2002 clearly shows the increasing trend. (Table 2) Although there are variation in different years, rice production has increased from 163 – 168 million metric tons over the seven year period. The highest production was in 2001 when the production reached 189 million metric tons. Similarly, wheat yield increased from 83 – 95 metric tons, with the highest production of 102 million metric tons in 2000. India remains the highest producer of cereal grains, both rice and wheat in the South Asian region. However, there is a paradoxical situation. On the one hand the rich and the affluent Asians are enriching and changing their diets and this is taking place at a rapid rate. These few merely rearrange their menus, the poor and the impoverished who are many scrounging. Due to phenomenal change there is a high demand for meat and milk products, fruits and vegetables with an increasing demand for feed grains. The changing pattern of consumption will intensify the demand for fast convenient foods, easy to prepare and consume, a trend evident in most of the urban areas. Despite this increasing affluence, there are as many as 800 million Asian living in abject poverty and nearly 20 million children remain undernourished. In Sri Lanka, 35% of children below 5 years of age are reported as malnourished or undernourished. Although the food is available poor people have no access to them due to widening income disparities. This is then the core of human misery, deprived of the most fundamental human right, the right to have sufficient food.
Secondary Educational Institutions and Students Enrolled and Teachers in India (in %)
Note: * in millions; $ in thousands.
Source: Based on Selected Educational Statistics, various years.
Technology development for Poverty Alleviation
There is considerable evidence that agricultural research has led to significant increases in productivity and enhanced incomes in developing countries (Lipton and Longhurst,1989; Kerr and Kolavalli,1999). The development of improved cultivars and management practices, mechanization, improved plant nutrition and crop protection technologies have been in the forefront of agricultural technologies contributing to increased crop yields in many developing countries. The Green Revolution, which is commonly referred to as “ seed revolution” which predominated in the early 1960s contributed to unprecedented increases in food production, wheat and rice yields increased by several folds. Due to the impact of green revolution the incidence of rural poverty declined as agricultural growth and purchasing power of the people rose. Advances in agricultural science and technology has increased productivity, hence it will be an important drive to improve food and nutritional security and reducing the number of poor in the coming years. As more than 90% of the of the food consumed in poor countries are produced locally, the efficiency of production has to be improved for the well being of the poor, through the use of appropriate technologies.
It is also seen that seed technologies have benefited the rich than the poor, landed than the landless and men rather than women. This will bring about some discrepancies in the effort to reduce poverty in all the developing nations. The uptake of modern technologies associated with commercialisation is an inequitable process that at best worsens the rural inequality but more likely to increase rural poverty. As evident in the Asian countries the shift into cash cropping will press farmers to sacrifice their own food crops and lead to more food insecurity. All areas with favourable conditions will benefit and worsen the regional inequities.
It is often assumed that technologies could benefit the poor farmers due to increased yield levels. This will enable them to meet the family consumption needs and also market the excess produce and earn income. The technologies could also create employment among the rural poor, particularly the landless labourers and earn higher wages. It can also benefit a wide range of the rural poor through growth of off-farm income. Displacement of labour from agriculture with the development of economies is a common phenomena in most of the countries.(Schuh, 1999) Although this will have a negative effect on the agriculture sector, this is an inevitable trend that has to be encouraged. Therefore, poverty alleviation should focus on helping the poor to get off farm income. Thus the research resources have to be cautiously spend, as poverty cannot be alleviated within agriculture alone.
There is evidence provided by Hazell (200) that the current research were not suitable for the poor farmers on four counts:
Technologies are not directed to the resource poor farmers. This is because the cash requirements are high for off farm inputs and they require more water. Due to these reasons poor farmers have achieved lower yields from modern technologies. These technologies also carry increased uncertainty and risks in poor farmers fields.
Some of the technologies developed for harsh climates are highly unreliable due to lack of research into development, assessment and refinement
Physical resources are lacking to adopt modern technology
Poor access to knowledge as agricultural information first reach farmers through mass media and extension agents. Poor farmers, who are of low socio economic status, rely on informal sources for technology information (Dasgutpta, 1989) and their knowledge about technology can be easily distorted. Poor knowledge about technologies is an important constraint to adoption (Reddy and Reddy, 1972).#p#分页标题#e#
Sometimes technology reaches the farmer at the declining stage of product prices. This is, as indicated before the early adaptors are usually large farmers who earn a sizable income.
Therefore to realize the full potential, the technology should effectively reach the poor farmers and for the poor to adopt the technology they should have a reduced or balance of resource requirements. Furthermore, small and medium farmers should receive priority in public funded research and extension. Also research should target on women as they are more involved an agriculture in the rural scene.
Food and Poverty
Cereal Production in South Asian Countries 1996 - 2002
Modern biotechnology is an undertaking with far-reaching socio-economic implications. The developed countries have heavily invested on biotechnology R&D and rapid progress have been made in the development pest resistant crop varieties, bio pesticides, growth promotants etc, which are being commercialised. All the countries of South Asia are pinning great hopes on agricultural biotechnology to alleviate poverty and hunger. Biotechnology seems to offer unlimited potentials for solving old and new problems. The biotechnological research and generation of new technologies are high cost and requires highly trained manpower and infrastructure., the settings which are available only in the industrialized countries. Therefore biotechnologies are considered as pro-rich technologies. Despite this most of the countries in the region are in the process of developing manpower in this area. Some countries such as India has gone far ahead in this process by not only developing the skilled manpower, but also investing in the sophisticated infrastructure for research. Most of the smaller nations are struggling to achieve in this field, often constrained by brain drain and inadequate infrastructure. Although the biotechnological research is costly its application will be within the reach of the farmers and other users in the Asian region, They will also require skills in their application, hence at the beginning only the progressive farmers may adopt the technologies . The pro-poor features of biotechnology will include reduction in the cost of production with the use of less expensive inputs such as bio fertilizers, biological management of pests, detection of pathogens and their bio control and applicability of biotechnological tools in a wide range of conditions for dry and marginal lands. There are also other features of biotechnology, which could be used in conjunction with traditional farming practices.
There are also massive problems in biotechnology such as bio safety issues and the displacement of traditional primary products imported from the Asian region such as flavouring agents and sugar substitutes, which are targets of biotechnology. Industrialized countries may not demand any more of primary products which the farmers used to produce, leading to acceleration of poverty. The private sector in developing countries is investing on biotechnology due to the possibility that new technologies could be patented. Many of these countries have formulated laws to allow private companies to obtain propriety rights to new technologies for commercialisation. As seen from the trends, if legislation is internationally acceptable a few large companies will hold the ownership of these patents. Under these situations, the developing countries will not be able to equitably share the genetic resources and likely to suffer. The people in Asia should probe these new technologies, but novelty should not sap our continuous commitment for less glamorous but essential programmes which are crucial for poverty alleviation. These include post harvest losses, renewable energy, agrarian reform, population policy as well as sharply focussed programmes for small scale producers and rural women involved in agriculture. This indicates that the public sector should play an proactive role and control over pursuing agricultural research and technology. Appropriate policy and programmes are required for grooming new technologies.
In agricultural technology development some new trends are also evident. In the past agriculture production was grain based, production led and environmentally unfavourable. Even though significant increases in food production have been made following these strategies, the nature of future challenges call for a change. In mobilizing this change, the intensification of land and water use, efficiency of the use of inputs like seed, fertilizer, agrochemicals, increase in productivity and the maintenance of the quality of the environment are the key considerations. Controlled environment agriculture (CEA), a high technology is expected to answer some of these issues, where the genetic potential of the crops could be manipulated to the maximum under controlled conditions. Some of the middle level farmers have taken up to CEA due to its many advantages mostly the income that could be generated within a short space of time. Under Sri Lankan conditions many of the entrepreneurs are those living in semi urban areas. This will be a means to relive some of the urban poverty that exist in the urban areas. Another emerging trend is the interest in organic agricultural production oriented to the production of chemical free healthy foods. This low input based agricultural production system is well established in some of the western countries, but becoming popular in the Asian continent. Although the crop yields are comparatively lower compared to the traditional production with the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the product prices are at least twice or more higher and export opportunities are also available.
A paradigm shift in technology development
The agricultural production has predominantly shifted from the earlier concept of increase in yield to the utilizable production of the whole chain that links the producer to the consumer. This could be attributed to several factors. As a result of trade liberalization most of the countries are moving towards policy setting and infrastructure development role. The objective of this is to reduce the transaction costs, while encouraging the private sector with greater access to resources, especially credit and information.. Presently a paradigm shift has taken place from primary production to development of secondary products as demanded by the consumer. This will bring about better utilization of primary products, value addition and income generation at each stage of production –consumption continuum. This approach will link the agro-industries to the production system, unlike in the past where agro industry was considered as a separate entity. This would mean that the modernization of agriculture will help to alleviate poverty by developing technologies for processing and value addition and be competitive in the international market. In particular, the export commodities will be directly employment enhancing due to their labour intensive nature. If the income from exports are substantial, it will lead to significant reduction of poverty .
Therefore, in the development of technologies, focus should be on several crucial issues. Of these product quality will be one of the most important. This will include biochemical characterization and physical components affecting either the nutritive value or industrial processing of primary products; developing gene involving such qualities and germplasm enhancement, development of post harvest mechanization and storage facilities, integrated pest management in storage, germplasm improvement for factors that cause storage losses, identifying opportunities for product diversification, processing of primary products, milling, use of by-products and assessment of demand for product development. Therefore, institutions involved in agricultural development will require a change in mind set from technology development from production to yield to those technologies for product utilization which will generate income and employment. Therefore, a paradigm shift from technology development for the sake of it as done on the past has to be reoriented to type and quality of product as determined by the market demand and not by the availability of technology. To achieve the best results, policies should be set in place to apply the technologies generated and grading systems and quality standards should be established and infrastructure developed.
CONCLUSION
Need for regional assessment of agricultural research
Although there is ample evidence that agricultural research has increased food production in the South Asian region, there is on going controversy whether agricultural research has been beneficial to the poor to overcome poverty. Currently the research is demand driven and caters mostly to the large or commercial farmers. Most of the technological innovations are developed in the developed countries. It is noted that many of these technologies are not affordable by the small farmers. The market demand for products too have changed, and product development should take into accounts the market demand. The question is that how these developments could influence the well being of the rural poor and alleviate their poverty. At a multi-stakeholder Regional Consultation held recently, December 2003 in New Delhi under the sponsorship of the World Bank, the role of agricultural science and technology in global poverty alleviation was discussed. The Consultation noted that despite the significant progress made in the past 30-35 years in raising food availability and consumption levels, improving nutrition levels and reducing poverty, much remains to be done in the future to achieve the targets. If the current trends are any indication, the number of hungry people would merely decline from 294 million to 217 million by 2015. Therefore, goals for reducing poverty cannot be met without substantial momentum and initiative.#p#分页标题#e#
In the South Asian situation also there are many unanswered questions regarding the technology generation to tackle poverty. Therefore, a regional technology assessment is proposed with the participation of all the stakeholders. Among the many, a few key issues that the proposed assessment may address are listed below.:
What is the potential of agricultural research to make the small farmer more viable?
How can agricultural research be focussed to alleviate the poverty among the rural farmers?
What technologies are suitable for rain fed areas where many of the poor live?
Is the development of technologies under the diversification strategy addressing all issue of the small farmers?
What is the potential of the emerging technologies such as biotech ( production and processing and value addition) to enhance off farm employment in poverty ridden areas?
How can the access to markets be improved for the small farmers?
How can the technology information disseminated to the small farmers? How can one ensure that the small and marginal producers are benefited from the “IT revolution”
What extent is the lack of infrastructure influence access. What are the short alternatives to lack of rural roads, electricity, storage etc, and can the private investment be mobilized to overcome these short comings?
What institutional arrangements that are available to assist the rural poor in coping with natural disasters, droughts, floods etc; to avoid adverse impacts on food and nutritional security?
What are the actions needed for development human capital, including gender balance to make the best use of the technology?
What are the best mechanisms for research funding to focus on technologies needed for the poor and the underprivileged?
Are the policies and legal frameworks set for developing technology aligned to assist the poor farmers?
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