Title:	Poverty Orientated Agricultural and Rural Development
Authors:	Hartmut Brandt and Uwe Otzen
Keywords:	Agricultural and Rural Development
Issue Date:	2007
Publisher:	Routledge
Description:	The background to this study is formed by the major changes in the global agrarian structure that have been clearly emerging since the beginning of this century. Two factors in particular – demographic changes and a virtually fixed global cultivated area – are resulting in a decline in the amount of cultivated land per capita and a need for crop yields to be increased. They are joined by the rapid commercialization of agricultural production in the wake of global urbanization. Through trade, the agriculturally strong countries of the world will increasingly help to supply the countries that are marginal in terms of natural resources. The growth of the world population has fallen sharply in recent decades. The global growth rate in the next two decades is expected to be no more than about 1 per cent p.a. At the same time, urbanization is accelerating in the developing countries, and in twenty years more than half the world’s population will be living in towns and cities. As a global average, rural population figures are already stagnant. Only in sub-Saharan Africa is the rural population still rising. Here too, however, the agricultural workforce is likely to be already in decline because AIDS is taking a heavy toll and because most of those migrating to the urban areas are young people of working age. In the next two decades at least, the world’s agricultural population and the rural workforce will shrink significantly – replicating the situation that occurred in the German Reich, for example, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. There is little chance, on the other hand, of increasing the global cultivated area from its present level, mainly because of high investment and production costs during or after land development. Yet old arable land is being lost to degradation, desertification, expanding urban areas and the use of land for transport and other infrastructure. Natural soil fertility is at risk, particularly in the tropics
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/48534
ISBN:	0-203-02875-9
Appears in Collections:	Rural Development Studies

Items in DSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.