Globally, 1.2 billion people are extremely poor—surviving on less than $1 a day—and three-quarters live in rural areas. Poverty is predominantly a rural phenomenon. Extremely poor people spend more than half of their income to obtain (or produce) staple foods, which account for more than two-thirds of their caloric intake. Most of these people suffer from nutritional deficiencies, and many go hungry at certain times of the year.
In recent years, development agencies and national governments have renewed their commitment to reducing poverty, hunger, and other human deprivations, as evidenced by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Among other objectives, the MDGs aim to halve the proportion of people living on less than $1 a day by 2015 (from the starting level of 1990). That means cutting the share of extremely poor people in low- and middle-income countries from 28 percent to 14 percent. The MDGs also call for halving the proportion of people suffering from hunger by 2015.
Rural poverty and hunger fell sharply between 1975 and 1990, but the rate of poverty reduction has since slowed. Net aid (that is, official development assistance) to developing countries fell from 0.35 percent of OECD countries’ gross national income in 1982–83, to 0.24 percent in 2002–03. The real value of net aid disbursed to agriculture in the late 1990s was only 35 percent of its level in the late 1980s, according to IFAD. And although the proportion of the economically active population engaged in agriculture has been falling in developing regions, it still exceeds 50 percent in Africa and Asia (table 1).