UN urges sustainable approach to ESCWA's rural development

BEIRUT: Experts from UN-ESCWA region as well as national, regional and international organizations met Monday at the UN headquarters in Beirut to discuss the need to adopt a sustainable livelihoods approach for promoting rural development in the ESCWA region. Director of sustainable development at ESCWA Anhar Hijazi gave a list of the approaches used during the past decades for diminishing poverty and improving the management of natural resources. 

“The approaches used in the past include the rights-based approach, governance approach and the microfinance approach but none of them was good enough to reach the required results,” she said. 

Hijazi, on the other hand, praised the sustainable livelihoods approach (SLA) which aims at dealing with the vulnerabilities of rural communities and improving their capacities which will strengthen them and make them better able to face external shocks. 

“This approach might be highly able to achieve the development goals of the century mainly the eradication of poverty,” she said. 

The sustainable livelihood approaches are a way of thinking about the objectives, scope and priorities for development. “They place people and their priorities at the center of development,” she said. “They focus poverty reduction interventions on empowering the poor to build on their own opportunities, supporting their access to assets, and developing an enabling policy and institutional environment.” 

Hijazi warned against the increasing desertification of lands in the rural areas of the ESCWA region, saying it would impact the economic activities in this region in a negative way. 

“The recession of the agricultural sector will increase poverty rates and encourage the rural population to immigrate to cities for the sake of finding new jobs opportunities,” she said. 

“Creating job opportunities is a real challenge especially with the growing size of population,” she added. 

Hijazi noted that the financial crisis has contributed to this problem because many people working in foreign countries came back to their rural areas without being able to find jobs to compensate for the ones they lost. 

According to a World Bank study, Arab countries are in dire need of creating 4 million job opportunities every five years to keep up with the fast pace of population growth in the Middle East and North Africa. 

The Trade Development Report (TDR) issued three months ago by the United Nations divided the ESCWA region into four categories. The first includes the oil-exporting countries (Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman), which witnessed huge losses amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars in their markets, and are expected to record huge deficits in their balance of payments during 2009, compared to the $400 billion of surplus scored in 2008. 

The second category includes Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan which have been affected by the global crisis through the return of a great number of expatriates and the decrease in the size of direct foreign investments. 

As for the third category, it includes Yemen and Sudan which are going to witness a great challenge resulting from the increase in unemployment which will prevent those countries from proceeding with their development goals by the year 2015. 

The last category includes the occupied countries (Palestine and Iraq) which are suffering from a fragmentation in their economic and social infrastructures and are unable to develop even if at slow pace. 

Hence, there is a web of interlinked factors affecting natural resources use and the livelihoods of rural communities in the region and there is a need for a comprehensive approach to rural development which enables a comprehensive understanding of the social, economic and natural factors within which rural communities make their decisions regarding natural resources use and livelihood strategies in order to protect both the natural resource base and the livelihoods of the people it is supporting. 

For his part, former Lebanese Agriculture Minister Adel Cortas encouraged the use of SLA because it highlights the problems facing rural communities and places people and their priorities at the center of development, unlike the integrated rural development (IRD) which is still adopted by the World Bank but places the advanced technology as a priority ahead of human beings. 

“Another advantage of this approach lies in its ability to attract the attention of decision and policy makers to the importance of agricultural and rural development as well as food security,” he said. 

He added that the financial crisis that took place in 2007 and 2008 is another incentive to to encourage the development of agriculture, which should not be neglected especially after the international hike in food products.