From poverty to power - Oxfam-Québec

FROM POVERTY TO POWERDomestic and regional markets may offer more potential thanNorthern export markets, especially in light of the latter’s tariff barriersand intimidating array of health and quality standards (althoughsmallholders in Latin America appear to have had some success in ridingthe globalisation wave). 85 Africa’s domestic consumption of foodstaples, including cereals, roots and tubers, and traditional livestockproducts produced and consumed mainly by poor people, is estimatedat around $50bn a year, more than five times greater than the value ofits traditional commodity exports, and this is expected to double by2015. 86However, with urbanisation and the spread of supermarkets, localmarkets are becoming more like international ones. Small-scale agriculturewill have to learn how to meet more exacting quality standardsand face intense competition even to sell locally, or else will be left withthe lowest-value dregs of the market. The hiding places from globalisationare shrinking, and both state action and producer organisationare essential to equip small farmers to keep up with the pace oftechnical and commercial change, and to reform the business modelthat currently excludes them.The countryside in many developing countries is being rapidlytransformed. While change has brought a mixed bag of opportunitiesand threats for poor farmers, the threats are greater and the opportunitiesare slimmer than for large farmers and other powerfulplayers. Many of these changes are likely to drive up inequality in thecountryside, both between rich and poor, and between women andmen. Poor farmers are more vulnerable, more likely to be squeezedout of new, higher-value agriculture, and less likely to benefit fromnew technologies.How governments and rural people shape and adapt to change willto a large extent determine the course of global poverty and inequalityover the coming decades. Only a concerted effort by a combination ofeffective, accountable states and active, organised citizens to redistributepower in agricultural markets can arrest growing inequality andrekindle agriculture’s ability to trigger national economic take-off andpoverty reduction.In any case, many rural communities will in all likelihood face afuture of out-migration and an ageing population. In Peru’s Sacred144