Rural-Urban Context

Of the approximately 800 million poor in the Asia-Pacific region, 500 million live in rural areas. At the same time, a growing share of the population is living, and expected to live, in urban areas.

The high rate of urbanization stresses the need for good urban management. It also raised questions about:

• The links between urban and rural areas; and
• Rural development polices in an urbanizing world.

Urbanization is the net effect of a complex process of movements of people, goods, capital and ideas that link urban and rural areas. While the urban population grows, the rural areas become more urban. Today, rural-urban linkages are changing because of numerous factors, including: (i) improvements in transport, (ii) improvements in communication, (iii) a diminishing role of government and (iv) decentralization.

Rural and urban areas and their economies are increasingly integrated, interdependent and complementary. There is a continuous exchange of people, goods, capital and ideas and information between urban and rural areas. Unfortunately, policy makers often do not take these interdependencies and linkages into account and their policies are divided along spatial and sectoral lines. Urban planners concentrate on the development of the urban areas without giving due attention to its impact on rural development, while rural development planners tend to ignore the urban areas, as if rural areas exist in isolation. Moreover, the administrative division in urban and rural areas results in a lack of coordination and in work at cross purposes. It is important when planning interventions in urban or rural areas to look at their consequences on the other. Integrating urban and rural poverty reduction therefore is of utmost importance.

The recognition of rural-urban linkages by policy makers is becoming all the more important in the light of the ongoing decentralization of government functions in many countries of the region. This decentralization catches many local governments ill-prepared for the new responsibilities, which include such important tasks as local economic development, the provision of basic infrastructure and services, poverty alleviation and environmental management. Furthermore, recent export-led poverty reduction initiatives, such as the “Empowerment of rural communities to export organic spices” in India and “One Tambon, One Product” in Thailand, have made it clear that these linkages may extend beyond country boundaries.

The Poverty Reduction Section is increasingly focusing its work on poverty alleviation through rural-urban linkages. As the theme of its 57th Session in May 2001, UNESCAP selected “Reducing disparities: Balanced development of urban and rural areas and regions within countries of Asia and the Pacific”. At its December 2001 meeting, the UNESCAP Committee on Socio-Economic Measures to Alleviate Poverty in Rural and Urban Areas recommended that “governments pay more attention to the development of small and medium-sized towns and build the capacity for poverty alleviation of local governments in those towns in order to reduce the pressure on mega-cities and primate cities, and it urges UNESCAP to provide technical assistance in this area”.

Related ongoing activities are paying particular attention to:

• Supporting initiatives of the urban poor (including migrants) to avoid the urbanization of poverty;
• Stimulating productive investment in small towns by migrants to promote rural development;
• Facilitating marketing by farmers of rural produce to reduce rural poverty; and
• Providing information to rural poor through ICT to empower the poor

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