Poverty: Rural Poverty

Poverty in rural areas very often depends on access to land. People who have access to their own land, irrespective of the quality of that land, are usually able to make a subsistence level of living from it or better. People who, on the other hand, must work on other people’s land or who do not have proper rights to land they do farm are much more likely to suffer from poverty. When natural disasters or climate change causes many people to lose their land (because it has become unusable), then poverty increases rapidly.

Poverty in rural areas has some specific features. The first involves social isolation: depending on the scale of land involved, people can suffer from isolation from other people and lack the resources to travel or communicate with them. This can disproportionately affect women who are obliged to stay at home and concern themselves with domestic labour. In addition to the personal deprivation, there are problems involved with sharing child care issues and care for elderly and unwell people. Further, pooling resources can help them go further in terms, for example, of food preparation.

Difficulty in travelling, because of lack of money and personal vehicles, especially in regions with little or no public transportation systems, makes it very difficult for people to find additional work or to sell their products at markets. The lives of poor people around the world tend to be characterized by a portfolio of different kinds of income-yielding or saving labour, which is easier to manage in urban rather than rural areas. Distance also makes the regular work of survival more difficult, especially when it involves such activities as having to fetch and carry water for daily use (which is generally work for girls and women).

Agricultural life works to a seasonal rhythm in which goods for consumption and sale are generally available only on an annual or semi-annual basis but requirements for expenditure can occur throughout the year. Rice farmers, for example, might sell their produce after the harvest but that is a time when the supply is high. They budget for the year ahead, buying clothes, seeds and other inputs but rarely have additional money for emergency medicine or repairs. In such cases, they have to borrow from merchants (who are not generally very charitable) and it is quite common – and has been for hundreds of years – for farming families to bear debts that have been accumulated over decades and which are, therefore, next to impossible ever to pay off.