When talking about poverty alleviation, the link to agriculture is easily made and shows to be essential, as poverty is mainly concentrated in rural areas where people rely on agriculture. Estimates of the proportion of poor people that live in rural areas range from 62 per cent (CGIAR, 2000) up to 75 per cent (IFAD, 2001). Smallholder farmers form the largest group of the rural poor with in Asia and the Pacific with 49 per cent (Jazairy et al., 1992). The poorest of the poor live and farm in the most difficult and harsh environments. Nelson et al. found that 375 million of the worldwide poor live in Asia in marginal areas (1997).

In principle increasing agricultural productivity would alleviate poverty. Higher agricultural productivity directly benefits the rural poor through increased production that could be used for home consumption and additional sales to increase income. Aside from the benefits for the rural poor, the urban poor also profit from an increase in agricultural productivity. Through an enlarged supply of food products, prices of these products would go down. This would especially benefit the urban poorest, who spend in relative terms more of their income on food.

However, how far can we go with increasing agricultural productivity?
During the green revolution, agricultural productivity increased dramatically. For example, rice output growth in Asia increased 2.1 per cent annually during 1955-1965 to 2.9 per cent annually during 1965-1980, surpassing the annual population growth rate of 2.3 per cent (Pingali and Heisey, 1999). The use of new improved varieties and a large area expansion were responsible for this strong increase. In the post-green revolution period rice yield growth rates stayed positive (although they decreased to around 1.5 per cent per year) due to a constant increasing use of fertilizers. More recently growth rates are stagnating.

Considering land scarcity in Asia, an increase in agricultural productivity should come from an increase in production per unit of land. However, the production of Asia's main crops is already high and yield gaps are small. Prospects for significant breakthroughs in yield increases are dim. A new green revolution might be able to increase production once more, but is however not likely to happen anywhere soon (Byerlee and Traxler, 1995).

Even though agricultural productivity increased due to the Green Revolution, rural poverty still persists. When looking at the poorest segment of the rural population, many could not access new technologies due to a lack of resources or because the innovations were not applicable in the farming environments of the poor. In the best cases, their adoption of innovations was only delayed. When innovations became cheaper through more widespread use, it became possible for some poor farmers to implement them. Generally, better-off farmers do have the required capital to implement innovations immediately and are therefore the first to profit. This brings up the question whether increasing agricultural productivity is the way to alleviate poverty among the poorest group of the rural population, small-scale farmers.

Additionally, agriculture has become less attractive as an area of investment. Infrastructure, better information systems and credit have become major goals in many (regional) development projects; whereas practical farming alternatives have received lesser attention. There is a need for simple direct low-cost innovations to assist poor farmers improve their livelihoods.

Current systems have become unsustainable and highly dependent on expensive external inputs. Increasing system’s sustainability and decreasing dependency on external inputs would decrease farmer's expenses and increase their income. The green revolution mainly focused on main staple crops. Secondary crops are commonly referred to as 'poor man's crop'. They are often the only crops that can be grown in harsh environments and make up an important part, if not the main part, of poor farmer’s farming system. Site-specific alternatives with low implementation costs focusing on secondary crops, would greatly assist poor farmers. For example, alternative systems that intercrop the main crop with legumes have shown to be able to increase yields, decrease labour requirements, decrease production costs due to decreased fertilizer need and have low initiation costs.

Written by Erika Speelman, Associate Expert, UNESCAP-CAPSA, Bogor, Indonesia.

(References available upon request)