Read at : Technorati – desertification
Water key to ending poverty and hunger in Africa, UN report says
May 16, 2008
by C.T. Pope
Circle of Blue
Almost two-thirds of sub-Saharan Africa’s rural poor could benefit from investment in water, a new UN report finds. The jointly commissioned report, Water and the Rural Poor, was presented by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) at the Sixteenth Annual UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD-16) on Monday. “Insecure access to water for consumption and productive uses is a major constraint on poverty reduction in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA),” the report found.
With almost half of Africa’s population suffering from water related diseases, the new assessment highlighted the potential for low-tech, highly localized, solutions to have a major impact the livelihoods of the rural poor.
Only 3 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s land is under irrigation systems – elsewhere, crop production relies almost entirely on seasonal rainfall. Harvest rates rise and fall with unpredictable rain patterns.
Subsistence farmers, who account for nearly 80 percent of the agricultural activity in sub-Saharan Africa, are often the most vulnerable to seasonal variation in rainfall. The long-term impacts of such unpredictability make it impossible for these rural farmers to break from subsistence to small-scale production, thus reinforcing the cycle of poverty.
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