Farmers moving out of poverty: what are the challenges?

Abstract

This paper draws upon the results of various research works undertaken between 1998 and 2007 in Indonesia while the author was working at the Centre for Poverty Alleviation through Sustainable Agriculture (CAPSA), in Bogor Indonesia. CAPSA, formerly the Coarse Grains, Pulses, Roots and Tubers (CGPRT) Centre is a subsidiary body of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. It intends here to discuss the implications of the multiple dimensions of poverty based on field observations and to relate them to policy issues with a focus on poverty alleviation in rural areas and the role of agriculture in poverty alleviation. After setting the stage with a policy matrix framework, it raises a couple of challenges about poverty in rural areas with a focus on agriculture and then provide field based evidence of the role of agriculture in poverty alleviation and the conditions under which one might expect agriculture to significantly contribute to reducing poverty. Field evidence is largely based on Indonesian situations. In the final part of this paper the future challenges of poverty reduction are discussed with a forward looking anticipatory approach based on recent works the author analysed in his current position of Senior Foresight and Development Policies expert with the Executive Secretariat of the Global Forum on Agricultural research. The study of farm trajectories indicate that agriculture has potential as a buffer against crisis and shocks and therefore can contribute to rural poverty alleviation, but it is neither sufficient nor necessary. This is further confirmed by the case of tree crops showing what would be the requirements for a household to reach cross-generation resilience. With a case of secondary crops we see that it is possible to define a framework for poverty alleviation which is people- centered. All these cases converge towards a shift in the concept of battling poverty, switching from a growth-based technological paradigm to a human-centered understanding of the drivers of rural poverty. The analysis of foresight works, though not centered on poverty enables us to derive implications in terms of poverty reduction according to different scenarios. Thus, the role of social sciences and humanities is to contribute to our understanding of the transformations which are shaping the paths to the different scenarios and inform about the actions that would lead to one or another, so that the future state of poverty will not be longer the results of implicit effects of human agency but the results of explicit societal choices.