AGRICULTURE:ULTIMATE WAY OUT OF POVERTY Part 2.

Poverty is no doubt one of those concepts  for which a description  is easier to give than a definition.This is because  poverty mean a whole lot of things to people around the world;what is poverty  to a European could be opulence  in other parts of the world for instance.

It is a truism that  a unique and universal  definition of poverty  will be very  difficult to get.But that is not my concern in this article. I am more than convinced that  if each and everyone of us  makes it his/her point of duty  to fight against what he/she perceives to be  poverty, we will end up  having  a world with poverty at its barest  minimum. In this article I present my perception of poverty and how I think this could be best tackled.

A world bank report of  2006 has noted that for any development to be sustainable, accent has to be placed primarily on ensuring that every mouth is sufficiently fed.This  report advocates that nutrition  has to be central  to all development initiatives. The views in this report had earlier been expressed by Fawzi-Al Sultan, one time president of the International Fund for gricultural Development(IFAD)  in  the following words:

A proper attack on  hunger requires  a real partnership  to deal with obstacles  the hungry  face, principally as producers, for the poor are rarely simply poor, they are poor farmers, poor fishermen, poor herders.

When I read the above words  from the proceedings  of the International Conference on overcoming Global Hunger. I jumped from the  my chair  and  said to my self, “Atlast, I have found  an approach to tackling poverty that is most suitable   for my country Cameroon and all other developing countries”

In Cameroon, One is not said to be poor until when he/she cannot  eat to their fill-the size a person’s dish is the main  indicator of status in  the rural part of Cameroon from which I hail. Hunger  in my part of the world is  highly viewed as the  starting point of a vicious cycle  that ultimately leads to death because a person who cannot eat to his/her fill will without any doubts  not have the means to pay for health bills when they are  sick, and will not even have the strength to think about  how to send  his/her children to school, talkless  of having any financial means to sponsor their education.

A person struggling to survive a famine or whose sole concern is what he will feed himself and his family with will rarely have even a passing thought on the effects his actions could have on the environment  for present and future generations as all that matters to him is to find a means to survive. Where I come from such persons are those considered to be poor and earmarked for death as it is not just hunger but also poverty that leads to the death of a person.This is because a person who has no contribution to make to society  is considered dead.

Concerning the right path to the eradication of poverty, Much has been said and so much more left unsaid; so many finger have been pointed, some in the right direction and others in the wrong direction.But this does not mean we should give up the search for a more inclusive, more sustainable, and more-people oriented approach to this fight. Going by my people’s perception of poverty, it is no doubt that the adoption of a more-agricultural and rural areas oriented approach to tackling poverty by governments and other stakeholders of developing countries like Cameroon whose rural areas plays host to more than half of its population and whose agricultural sector despite its abandonment and neglect still accounts for a very significant portion of its GDP and absorbs a great number of its working force.

In the next few weeks, I am going to outline the importance of the agricultural sector and rural areas in the fight gainst poverty in my country Cameroon and end up with concrete proposals on how this could be done.