Geneva – The UN economic agency UNCTAD has urged poor nations to adopt China’s rural reforms in order to stem migration.
The bloc also stressed the need for nations to ditch any get-rich-quick ideas about exposing their farmers to the glare of global market.
Taffere Tesfachew, head of the Least Developed Countries division at UNCTAD, said China’s rural reforms had twinned privatisation with promoting the emergence of non-farm enterprises in rural areas.
But that was not happening in many African economies today because countries were failing to develop non-farming rural enterprises, and as farm productivity increased people were being forced to move away because of lack of jobs.
Tesfachew said the key was careful sequencing of rural reforms like electricity which would lift farm output, and investing in schools and local roads that would provide demand and create non-farm jobs.[pro_ad_display_adzone id=”70560″]
He added that rural communities should only be connected to towns once they start to thrive economically.
“Sometimes the road is built from the city to the rural area, and then the possibility of rural enterprise emerging is not there because they can’t compete with products coming from cities.”
According to him, governments could also help by improving data on the rural sector, and ensure that smaller, poorer and women farmers are not left behind by reforms that privilege big farms with well-educated workers.
Similarly, UNCTAD Secretary-General Mukhisa Kituyi, at a news conference said that “migrants coming out of Africa, for example, are in the majority displaced because of the inability of agriculture to accommodate them, to give them decent livelihoods.
“A sustainable solution to Africa’s contribution to illicit migration is not to be dealt with by declarations in Malta or in Addis Ababa that we should be humane and stem the migration.
‘’ It’s to be addressed by creating viable livelihoods for the populations that are being disgorged by unviable agriculture.”
He blamed policies pushed by international institutions, such as the World Bank in the 1990s, for encouraging national governments to embrace “the panacea of the marketplace” while cutting back on social and infrastructure investment.
Kituyi, said it was now clear that had been a mistaken policy.
One country that was managing such a rural transformation was Ethiopia, Kituyi said, turning it from the “largest exporter of youth” two decades ago to a country of refuge for people fleeing its neighbour Eritrea(Reuters/NAN)