Kathmandu, November 25

As the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has targeted to eliminate world poverty by 2030, it has identified that rural sector development of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) is the main driver to eradicate human development shortfalls and will be essential to achieving SDGs in these countries.

A global report on the Least Developed Countries-2015 unveiled by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), today, has focused on the structural transformation of rural economies, which is essential for LDCs to benefit more fully from international trade and investments.

The report has identified the need for more effective policies to promote small-scale agriculture and non-agriculture sectors and to strengthen the synergies between them. As per the UNCTAD report, poverty rates are twice as high in rural areas than in towns and cities and two-third of the population of LDCs live in rural areas.

“As the rural population has been growing relatively high, the challenge of eliminating rural poverty will be further heightened by rapid growth of the rural workforce in most LDCs over the next 15 years,” says the report.

The report unveiled today highlighted the need to create synergies between agricultural upgrading and rural economic diversification through development of rural non-farm economy.

For the rural transformation, which has been taken as a primary concern to achieve the SDGs, the report has recommended some crucial issues, like financing productive investment, harnessing technology for agriculture transformation, promoting entrepreneurial rural economies and combining infrastructure investment that mainly impacts on productivity which subsequently creates enough livelihood activities in rural areas.

The report also invokes donors to meet their long-standing commitment to provide 0.7 per cent of their gross national income in development aid, which will allow donors to make allocations in line with the LDC share of global needs to meet the recently adopted SDGs that would amount to a six-fold increase in aid to LDCs by 2030.

Among the 48 LDCs, only two — Bhutan and Djibouti — have a poverty gap of less than one per cent of gross domestic product. LDCs account for some 40 to 50 per cent of the global needs to meet the SDGs in terms of extreme poverty and increased access to water and electricity.