2022 Global Forum on Poverty Reduction and Sustainable Development

A recording of this message can be found on YouTube and Tencent Video

Distinguished Guests,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Greetings,

I thank the Hong Kong University Business School and the National Rural Revitalization Administration for the invitation to address the 2022 Global Forum on Poverty Reduction and Sustainable Development.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to reverberate, with a fragile and uneven economic recovery that puts at risk our ability to realize the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, including the ending of poverty in all its forms everywhere by 2030.

Even before the pandemic struck, we were seeing worrying signs. The baseline, pre-pandemic projections suggested that 6% of the global population would still be living in extreme poverty in 2030, and the global extreme poverty rate increased to 9.2% in 2020, compared to a pre-pandemic projection of 7.7%.

Seven out of every ten people living in extreme poverty reside in rural areas, and over 90% of those in extreme poverty globally are concentrated in just two regions: sub-Saharan Africa (70%) and South Asia (20%).

With over 3.4 billion people living in rural areas of developing countries, where small-scale farmers are responsible for the majority of food production, eliminating poverty cannot be achieved if rural communities continue to struggle from a growing combination of crises.   

Poverty, especially rural poverty, is inextricably linked to our ongoing climate crisis. Climate change has shifted weather patterns, led to more frequent droughts and extreme weather events, creating more uncertainty in the agriculture sector, and reducing agricultural productivity, and the corresponding incomes, of small-scale producers.

While we are currently off-track in the goal to eliminate poverty and have been moving in the wrong direction, we are not helpless and can change this trajectory if we work together, through public-private and multisector partnerships, learning from countries that have made significant progress in poverty reduction, and listening to the needs of rural populations to ensure our efforts are targeted and effective.

China serves as an example, that with concerted efforts and targeted poverty alleviation programmes, it is possible to not only reduce extreme poverty, but to eliminate it. Since 2012, China has lifted almost 99 million people out of extreme poverty, especially benefitting people living in rural areas.

While this remarkable achievement can serve to inspire similar actions in other countries, there is still work left to do as persistent relative poverty and multi-dimensional poverty remain huge challenges for China.

To address these challenges, the United Nations in China has continued its support to alleviate multi-dimensional and relative poverty through rural revitalization, job creation, small and medium enterprise (SME) development, and enhancing employment opportunities that comply with international labour standards. We have also worked to redirect public and private funding to improve financial access and to develop innovative financing mechanisms to support livelihoods in China.

Ladies and gentlemen,

The task before us is clear. We need to rethink our policies and programmes to alleviate poverty, take a more holistic, people-centred approach, and rapidly expand the available financing for poverty alleviation, especially in the Least Developed Countries, if we hope to achieve the ambitions of the 2030 Agenda.

To do this, we need a multi-pronged approach that addresses the multiple facets of extreme poverty in rural areas.

First, we must transform food systems and build the resilience of smallholder farmers to climate, conflict and income shocks. To do this, we must increase the productivity of small-scale farmers within planetary boundaries, move towards diversified agricultural production by adopting nature-based and knowledge-based agriculture, and ensure greater digital connectivity in rural areas, so that these farmers can be better connected to the markets where they sell their goods.

Sustainable agriculture can deliver a triple-win for people, climate, and nature. But to deliver on this potential, we need increased public and private investment and metrics and data to demonstrate these benefits. One example of this potential is that while small-scale farmers feed two-thirds of the world’s population, growth in Africa’s agriculture productivity has dropped by 34% since 1961. If we can reverse this trend and expand productivity, this will go a long way to reducing rural poverty and global hunger.

We must also remember that poor people and smallholder farmers are part of the solution but remain cut off from global decision-making and finance. Indigenous peoples in contexts of the climate crisis, food shortages and hunger have been able to respond by using their knowledge to identify appropriate seeds for each climate. We must make a greater effort to incorporate this traditional knowledge and disseminate it more broadly. 

Finally, significant changes are needed to the global financial system in order to release the resources required to achieve these goals. As Mr. António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, recently stated, “Developing countries are drowning in debt, with no fiscal space or access to financial resources to invest…We need urgent action on debt to increase liquidity and ease the pressure on developing countries. Credit and financing facilities, both public and private, need to go into crisis mode.”

The UN in China remains committed to working with the people and Government of China to ensure poverty, both in China and around the world, is eliminated in this Decade of Action to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. We will continue to work with Chinese counterparts to facilitate knowledge sharing on poverty reduction and rural development between China and other developing countries.

We must not forget that the central, transformative promise of the 2030 Agenda is to “leave no one behind.” This means we must redouble our efforts to ensure we are reaching the poorest of the poor, the most disadvantaged and vulnerable groups, and to ensure that they also benefit from the progress we are making towards sustainable development.

I wish this forum great success. Thank you.