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.

Agriculture: Ultimate Way Out of Poverty

Malaria is the first cause of death in Cameroon and many other African countries. Reason why Combating Malaria is such a priority to governments in Africa and the rest of the international community. The international community’s concern for the fight against malaria was more explicitly made manifest at the UN millennium General Assembly during which world leaders included the fight against malaria and other diseases in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

So many initiatives have been carried out by Cameroon’s government with the support of international donors like the world fund for the fight against Malaria in the past decade. The K.O Malaria campaign launched on the 20^th of August 2011 by Cameroon’s Prime Minister and head of government in the presence of a host of national and international dignitaries and celebrities is one of such initiatives. This campaign aims to distribute 8.5 million treated mosquito nets to Cameroon’s more than 20 million inhabitants and raise the user-rate of treated mosquito nets from 15 to 80%.

The current 15% treated mosquito net user-rate compared to efforts by the government and its partners kick malaria out of Cameroon is very disappointing and makes the effectiveness and efficiency of mosquito nets distribution campaigns questionable. The already low treated mosquito net user-rate could be even lower if the effective use of these nets is measured instead. This is because in Cameroon, the need to survive has caused a good proportion of people who have received mosquito nets to use them more for other things than protecting themselves of mosquito bites. This is the case with people living in marshy areas who, pushed to the wall by poverty and the necessity to survive, have turned their treated mosquito bed nets into fishing nets. Part of the catch serves as food and the rest is sold to provide for other basic necessities of these people.

The impact of this important and laudable initiative is thus not felt with the desired the intensity and the fight against malaria is slowed down by practices like the above. But is it wrong for a person who does not have food and lack the means of paying his/her health bills to use a treated mosquito bed net to catch fish which can partly provide for his needs? How do we fight against extreme poverty, reduce hunger, eradicate illiteracy, reduce infant mortality, improve maternal health care, achieve gender equality, fight against diseases, ensure environmental sustainability in an integrated and coordinated way? This question raises the problem of the poverty alleviation strategies and other development policies.

The fight against extreme poverty and hunger, the eradication illiteracy, reducing infant mortality, improving maternal health care, achieving gender equality, fighting against diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability, and establishing a partnership for development  constitute what is commonly referred to as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)  which are contained in the UN’s Millennium Declaration of September 2000. This document has since its adoption by the Un General Assembly become the framework and reference document of many developing countries like Cameroon. Cameroon’s Vision 2035 and Nigeria’s Vision 202020 just to name these are examples of visions which are a contextualisation of the MDGs to local and national realities.

The 8 MDGs are intimately related and there is no doubt that the achievement of one depends on the achievement of the other. The inter relatedness of MDGs though an advantage, makes it difficult for policy makers to map out clear and sustainable strategies to effectively tackle the challenges our world faces. The interdependent nature of MDGs makes imperative the use of an integrated approach to fight extreme poverty, reduce hunger, eradicate illiteracy, reduce infant mortality, improve maternal health care, achieve gender equality, fight against diseases, ensure environmental sustainability, and achieve a partnership for development at community, national, and international level. But how can this be done?

The answer to this question is attempted in next article.