Poverty is not a number, the environment is not a butterfly

This paper looks at the current treatment of rural poverty and the environment, highlighting why an enduring integration of poverty and the environment has proven difficult in practice. It highlights the trade-offs that must be made between prevailing approaches to poverty alleviation and proposes policy guidelines designed to allow the international community to take steps towards integrating poverty alleviation and environmental sustainability in rural areas.

Recommendations to ensure that poverty alleviation and environmental sustainability are promoted in rural areas:

• institutional reform must allow the rural poor to increase their control over and access to natural resource wealth and environmental assets in the areas in which they live
• education and health services, introcution of technological improvements, extension of basic infrastructure and access to credit must be delivered by national governments on a sustained basis
• pro-urban policies and incentives must be reversed to ensure that meso and macro policies provide a steady stream of financial, technical and human resources to rural areas
• political arrangements must be restructured to ensure adequate representation of rural populations and rural interests
• urban populations must pay rural communities for their stewardship of environmental goods and services on which healthy urban life and wellbeing depend