By Alison Small
NAPIER, New Zealand, Apr 30 2018 (IPS)

If an estimated 500 million smallholder farmers at a conservative estimate, produce 70 percent of the food we eat, why are they still so invisible in many countries?

Governments, development agencies, non-governmental organizations and the private sector have been working for decades on rural development in developing countries but still rural areas lag far behind cities and outlying areas in terms of infrastructure, services, social and economic development, notwithstanding the contribution that rural producers make to supplying us with food.

A tea farmer in Nyeri County, central Kenya contemplates what to do after his crop was damaged by severe weather patterns. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

In most developing countries, rural producers are especially vulnerable to extremes of climate, drought followed by flooding, and other weather related issues, along with restricted services of almost every kind. Not by coincidence do we find that three-quarters of the world’s 836 million people living in extreme poverty are found in rural areas.

Smallholder farmers continue therefore to be largely invisible, notwithstanding our dependence on the food and other goods they produce. Its a paradox that appears to have become an inevitability. What you don’t see, doesn’t affect you.

In developed countries we worry about the rise of beggars on the streets, who make us feel uncomfortable as we step around them to enter our favourite cafe, bank or shop, and sometimes we offer them a coin or something to eat or drink. But the poor in rural areas, barely affect us. Perhaps subconsciously we think, they are living on the land, they can produce their own food, whereas seeing beggars in urban areas surrounded by concrete is perhaps more identifiable as poverty.

How many tourists visit rural areas, how many people actually witness rural poverty in developing countries, and if they do, perhaps the problem seems so entrenched that it appears intractable. The rural poor are largely off our radar, even off the radar of many governments it would appear. They exist, we exist but we seem unable to bridge the divide effectively.

Development agencies can point to hundreds of millions of dollars spent in projects and programmes aimed at improving the conditions of the rural poor, schools, shelter, wells for water, the provision of planting materials and other assistance to farmers, including significant assistance to rural women, women’s groups, women farmers, as well as access to extension and even some limited banking services. The fact is that distance, entrenched poverty, cultural biases, and poor governance, exacerbate the rural-urban divide.

The irony is that rural poverty increases the vulnerability of governments to instability, terrorism and economic vulnerability because poverty can easily be exploited and the poor manipulated. But if we are seeking solutions to feed a growing world population projected to reach 9.8 billion people by 2050, the problem is fundamental to human survival. We help the food producers, the majority of them in rural areas and smallholders, we help ourselves, we also add to political stability and economic prosperity.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals are ambitious, and the measurement of progress to achieve the goals is a hugely expensive development process of its own, but are real efforts being made by governments or is this just lipservice to the UN and for the UN to show some sort of progress without effecting any systemic change in the way resources including goods and services are divvied out by governments?

The Agenda 2030 vision and commitment are that no one will be left behind. It was adopted by 150 world leaders in 2015 but we have a long way to go before we can expect to see any progress to reach the 2030 target date.

New Zealand’s Helen Clarke, then Executive Head of the United Nations Development Programme stated “that ours is the last generation which can head off the worst effects of climate change and the first generation with the wealth and knowledge to eradicate poverty, for which reason, fearless leadership is needed”. But more than leadership, we need to keep the momentum going and we need to really consider what is actually working and what may need to be scrapped.

The International Fund for Agricultural Development, one of the three Rome food and agriculture based agencies, will be holding an international conference on rural inequalities to consider how to overcome disparities from 2 to 3 May.

Can the 60 international speakers come up with anything new that may give us some hope for progress . It would be an encouraging sign to see concrete suggestions by practitioners and even if a handful of governments could take some of the suggestions or proposals , set aside serious money and constructively work to improve the lives of the rural poor in a bid to keep humanity moving in the right direction over the next 33 years when we have 2.2 million more mouths to feed.

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Newspaper kiosk in Istanbul's Kadiköy district. Credit: Joris Leverink/IPS

By Alison Small
NAPIER, New Zealand, Apr 17 2018 (IPS)

Rarely has the press been as powerful as it is today. Thanks to the advent of social media, the use of which has grown exponentially, the combination of the formal press, newspapers, television and radio is now strengthened, and itself even kept in check by social media. Jo and Joanne citizen have found a voice, not infrequently with the power of a political and social tsunami.

Alison Small

What does this mean for the greater good? Is this helpful to governments to have so much feedback, so quickly?

The role of global policeman has changed from one powerful government or several governments to what used to be called the Fourth Estate, the press frequently on the back of social media.

In many developed and developing countries public opinion has rarely been so vocal, gone are the days of the so called silent masses.

From the Arab spring to the near independence of Catalonia, the plight of Rohingha refugees to name just a few, the negative effects of climate change, the driving force has been the voices of ordinary people, fleshed out by effectively 24-hour analysis by news agencies, newspapers, blogs and just about anyone with access to the internet.

This new role of public opinion is weighty, often meaning that the weight of opinion can condemn before due process has had a chance to examine both sides of an argument.

At this point it is up to the media to step in and to try to analyse with some objectivity the groundswell from so many voices pronouncing on an event or events. It means that only the most determined governments, those determined to censor or limit both traditional and social media, can make laws without the huge onslaught of public opinion holding sway.

We need the media to raise awareness to help governments create, regulate and enforce laws but we also need to ensure that uninformed opinion does not dominate and cause as much if not more harm than is already possible at the government level.

That said, the latest scandal that has hit social media giant Facebook and the abuse of data provided by users, whether voluntary or involuntary, means that the integrity of social media platforms is now heavily in question.

On the other hand, the formal media come into their own at this point as newspaper, TV and radio revel in a blow by blow analysis of the problems facing the governance and security of social media, thus the press versus the informal press creates a degree of self regulation.

Facebook is now obligated by the US and other governments to provide more security to users. Thus even the social media has its own checks and balances. Whether they will be sufficient to self-regulate in the future will depend on how vigilant users are themselves and the ethics of the platform administrators, owners and big business which through advertising keeps social media alive.

The fact remains that despite actual and potential abuses of press freedom to influence voters and the public in general or governments to change policies or address issues, we have effectively gone too far to turn back.

More to the point, with political parties everywhere dependent on their ability to influence voters through their appeal to the media and more lately social media, or for that matter, the public to lobby governments and or the private sector to raise awareness about anything from politics to environmental, social and health issues, we rely on the media to convey information, whether the traditional media or social media platforms.

The real issue is whether or not the media at large has sufficient ability to self-regulate or has it already spiralled out of control in terms of influencing opinion, be it about the evils of unlimited plastic consumption or mass migration, to bringing down governments and major private interests.

We need the media to raise awareness to help governments create, regulate and enforce laws but we also need to ensure that uninformed opinion does not dominate and cause as much if not more harm than is already possible at the government level.

If we limit the power of social media, we are limiting citizens’ rights to make their voices heard and yet in all things a degree of control is needed. Can we therefore trust those who would undertake such controls not to go too far so that social media, as has happened with the traditional media, is not used as a weapon in itself. This is the dilemma that Facebook is confronting, the outcome of that debate will be the ultimate litmus test for scial media, and in a sense for traditional media as well.

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