Sustainable agriculture and rural development are vital factors in tackling global poverty. The Sustainable Development Goals include eliminating global hunger and achieving food security with sustainable agriculture. But with the global population growing so rapidly, and climate change causing devastation to much agricultural land, achieving this won’t be easy.
Until a decade ago, development initiatives were aimed at aiding people out of the agriculture sector and into manufacturing and service sector jobs. However, the 2008 food crisis put agriculture back in the forefront of global development agendas. In 2016, the United States government implemented the Global Food Security Act which was praised by numerous nongovernmental organizations for making food and agriculture a development priority.
Poverty in rural areas still remains far above that of urban areas, despite the fact that 80 percent of the food produced across sub-Saharan Africa and Asia comes from smallhold rural farmers. That makes up some 2.5 billion livelihoods. Today, there are many different types of organisations working across the board to contribute to this sector of global development. From research and innovation of new crops to policy making and project implementation on the ground, governments, NGOs, and the private sector alike all have a vested interest in agricultural and rural development.