Investing in the Rural Poor A Challenge for the 21st Century.

• Author: Bint Talal, Princess Basma
• Position: Seeking sustainable development

Over the past half century; there has been a growing awareness that humankind is placing immense pressure on the earth's resources--land, water and atmosphere--in its quest for better living. At the dawn of this millennium, global natural resources and the ecological system are threatened and may even undermine the efforts to improve the nutritional and living standards of all people. Still valid a decade or more later is the report--Our Common Future--of the World Commission on Environment and Development, m which the Commissioners were categorical in their recommendation "that a new development path was required, one that sustained human progress not in a few places for a few years, but for the entire planet into the distant future".

The threat is real and the challenge is clear. Out of necessity and a desire to reap immediate gain, people and development programmes often have neglected available resources and instead actually increased the risk of greater deprivation. Development, especially for those who do not have enough to eat and in order to improve the living conditions of those who labour simply to obtain the basic necessities of life, must continue. But it must continue in a way that increases productivity and reduces poverty while maintaining and even enhancing the health of the resources upon which life depends. The only truly meaningful development is when it is an effectively sustainable development. Moreover, rural development can be sustained only if it is ecologically sound.

There is a need to crystallize perceptions about the crucial issues in order to sharpen the focus of domestic and international policies, if sustainable development is to be pursued in a meaningful manner. The quality of life for the rural poor depends primarily on the increased productivity of their labour and the continued fertility of the resources--and the two are inexorably linked.

Although the last decade has seen a proportionate decrease in the number of people in abject poverty, at the outset of the millennium there are more poor people in absolute numbers than the world has ever known. If the present trend continues, we will have a world divided by immense inequity, with the poorest regions falling further behind.

The present number -- 1.3 billion people living on less than a dollar a day--is momentarily constant, with the imminent danger that the figure could inflate with any complacency on the part of the rest of humanity. Yet, thoughtless...