The State of world rural poverty

Idriss Jazaïry, IFAD Staff, Idriss Jazairy, John Stanier, ZFAD Staff

Poverty is spreading. There are now as many people living in absolute poverty - almost a billion in the rural Third World alone - as there were living on the entire planet only a century ago. Yet poverty continues to be shrouded in mystery. Consider that four-fifths of the world's poor live in rural areas; about 340 million people worldwide are currently chronically ill from malnutrition; over 500 million do not get enough calories to do a full day's labor; at a time when enough grain is being produced to provide everyone in the world with twice the daily minimum caloric requirements, global hunger is at an all-time high; and half again as many rural women - almost 600 million - live in absolute poverty today as did 20 years ago. We need to ask ourselves what has gone wrong. Despite almost four decades and billions of dollars in development activities, we are barely in a position to...

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