Existing evidence indicates that, worldwide, most of the poor live in rural areas and that agriculture and natural resource management are central to the livelihoods and food security of this population.
Many of the rural poor are family farmers, subsistence producers and/or agricultural workers. They include fisherfolk, pastoralists, forest-dependent people and households with no natural resource-based assets and limited access to productive means, many of whom also experience social exclusion and physical remoteness.
While a range of poverty measures exist and are commonly used at the aggregate level, harmonized information on rural poverty is less readily available, which could inform a sound and homogeneous measurement.
Among the many hurdles that need to be addressed in order to improve and harmonize the measurement of rural poverty, three main ones are examined in the present report.
First, the definition of “rural area” is laden with conceptual and measurement complications as a result of the specificity of what is considered a rural space and the associated livelihoods. Definitions tend to be diverse across countries, and certainly more diverse compared to urban contexts. In fact, the official (administrative) definition of rural areas is strictly not comparable across countries.
Second, the diversity of rural livelihoods and lifestyles is rarely taken into account in the measurement of poverty. In fact, common measurement frameworks are often assessed with an urban view of what constitutes the notion of “well-being”.
Third, much of the data required to undertake a specific measurement of rural poverty have not been available in many countries. Poverty measures need to be computed at the household or individual level, and data gathered through costly surveys are not necessarily comparable across countries and are infrequent in many.
To contribute to addressing this gap and to propose a harmonized international measurement framework for rural areas, FAO has started a partnership with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford. The two institutions have undertaken a joint programme of work aimed at improving the conceptualization of poverty in rural areas, while proposing, discussing and testing a multidimensional measure.
