Millions of young people in developing countries who are poised to enter the labour force in the coming decades need not flee rural areas to escape poverty, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in a report released on Monday.
Rural areas have vast potential for economic growth pegged to food production and related sectors, the annual State of Food and Agriculture report said.
With the majority of the world's poor and hungry living in these areas, achieving the 2030 development agenda will hinge on unlocking this frequently neglected potential, it said.
Doing so will require overcoming a thorny combination of low productivity in subsistence agriculture, limited scope for industrialization in many places, and rapid population growth and urbanization - all of which pose challenges to developing nations' capacity to feed and employ their citizens, according to the Rome-based UN agency. Transformations of rural economies have been credited with helping hundreds of millions of rural people lift themselves up out of poverty since the 1990s, the report noted. However that progress has been patchy, and demographic growth is raising the stakes. Targeting policy support and investment to rural areas to build vibrant food systems and supporting agro-industries that are well connected to urban zones -especially small and medium size cities - can create employment and allow more people to stay, and thrive, in the countryside represents a strategic intervention, the report said. "Too often ignored by policy-makers and planners, territorial networks of small cities and towns are important reference points for rural people - the places where they buy their seed, send their children to school and access medical care and other services," FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said in his forward to the report. "Policy-makers are urged to recognize the catalytic role of small cities and towns in mediating the rural-urban nexus and providing smallholder farmers with greater opportunities to market their produce and share in the benefits of economic growth".
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