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I fully support the recent comments of David Gibbon and Diana Lee Smith in this debate about moving away from stereotypes associated with occupations in rural and urban space. . DfID has had a major role through its strong advocacy of a livelihoods framework of showing how diverse occupations are among rural, peri-urban and urban populations and surely this contribution should play an important part in future policy approaches to agricultural development. The other stereotype mentioned in these exchanges is the segregation of rural and urban space, which comes easy to those of us who have worked for many years in rural areas with rural populations on the issue of agriculture. Yet increasing numbers of poor rural and urban poeple do not share this artificial separation, as David reports from Bangladesh. Agriculture is a crucial component of many urban livelihood strategies just as growing numbers of the rural poor can only survive through seeking out multiple income souces, many of which are linked to urban centers. These facts and the urbanizing trends mentioned in earlier contributions should caution us against swapping statistics on where the poor are located as a basis for policy decisions. On the other hand, the continued persistance of global poverty in the face of the commitments of the Millenium Development Goals with regard to poverty reduction indicate the need for policies that can have very large scale impact on poverty, as Michael and Merle Lipton argue. Some seem to fear that grappling with the realities of multiple livelihood strategies and rural-urban linkages is a diversion from the main task of poverty reduction. But productivity increases in the rural heartlands cannot be the only answer, especially with the evidence for shifts away from staple consumption in urban centers. One way DfID agricultural policy can address the reality of mulitiple livelihoods pursued by millions of the poor living along the rural-urban continuum is to link agriculture to a regional development approach, which proritizes rural-urban linkages which diversify employment opportunities, spread value added to rural farming families, supports identification of comparative advantage in rural and peri-urban agricultural production and supports, through its involvement in PRSPs and their implementation, the reform of national policies that perpetuate the stereotype of agriculture as the unique rural occupation and restrict or prohibit it as a strategy of the peri-urban and urban poor. Gordon Prain __________________________________ Gordon Prain, Ph.D., Global Coordinator, URBAN HARVEST the CGIAR System-wide Initiative on Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture, CIP, Av. La Molina 1895 Apartado 1558, La Molina, Lima Peru. Tel. 51 1 349 6017; direct line 51 1 317 5346 FAX: 51 1 317 5326 Email: <address removed> Website: <http://www.cipotato.org/urbanharvest/> ============================================================= To send a reply to this message that goes to all list members, make sure that you send your reply to <address removed> To unsubscribe from this list, send an email to "<address removed>", with the message body: unsubscribe science-and-technology <your-email-address>
Please visit dfid-agriculture-consultation.nri.org.