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Mkapa: Support rural poor`s efforts to combat poverty
2008-05-17 09:30:48
By Guardian Correspondent
Former president Benjamin Mkapa has called for deliberate efforts in the Eastern African region to support the rural poor in their efforts to bail themselves out of abject poverty.
Mkapa said for the rural poor to succeed in their struggle, their efforts must be underwritten by assured support of human resources and material inputs.
The retired president told over 800 Rotarian delegates attending the 83rd Rotary District Conference in Dar es Salaam on Thursday that the rural poor in the region were not resource poor since their biggest asset and factor for their development was their land.
He told the Rotarian delegates from Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania that what the rural poor need most was security tenure, be it perpetual freehold ownership or land use leasing and titling.
``Such legal recognition may be endowed to the individual or the community. Without such surety they will not be driven to plan and produce thereon beyond the subsistence threshold,`` he cautioned.
He said this was an imperative for both urban and rural dwellers, but especially for rural people because secure tenure was the most critical factor to protect poor people`s livelihood. Mkapa said that was also a factor certain to unleash the spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation.
He also underscored the need for ensuring that development assets such as forests and underneath mineral deposits when exploited as national development assets must also take account of the development interests of the communities in situ or in the neighborhood.
The retired president who was presenting a paper on Poverty alleviating through Rural Development warned that the absence of a legal regime for the sharing of revenues emanating from the national exploitation of these resources could be a veritable source of instability and accelerated poverty.
The third phase government president also hinted that a major obstacle to the enabling and empowering of the rural poor, indeed the poor as a whole was attitudinal.
He said development strategies tend to presume that they only want to take and have nothing to give and contribute to the process.
``This is contrary to the spirit of self-reliance and is unduly patronizing. And if it is not squarely faced it may engender a dependence culture among the poor people dependence on central government, and dependence on foreign aid,`` he cautioned.
Truly speaking, he said, once given the chance, poor people would work to get out of poverty.``There is a thought that poverty is a public policy failure; poverty is man-made by action and non-action: poverty can be eliminated.`` he said.
He said in order to bail out the rural poor out of poverty, they should be enabled to have access to knowledge and skills for development, have access to development capital, access to modern equipment and technologies of production and have access to expanding markets made possible by strong, faster and dependable communication infrastructure.
He lashed out at agricultural officers for not carrying out their duties as required.
He said unfortunately lately such trained professionals have tended to be desk bound, and at ministerial, regional and district headquarters.
This trend has to be reversed if we want to see increased productivity and yield.
To complement this negative disposition the prices of chemical agricultural inputs such as fertilizers and insecticides have continued to soar, while international financial lenders and bilateral donors strictly frown upon any proposals for subsidies on such inputs, and development assistance to agriculture had declined in the last decade.
To African farmers, he said, conventional fertilizers cost two to six times than world market prices.
He said that was yet another phenomenon which should be reversed.
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