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The motto for International Youth Day is “The Road to 2030: Eradicating Poverty and Achieving Sustainable Consumption and Production”.
Young people in rural areas, particularly young farmers, have a fundamental part to play in the campaign against poverty; handing over to the new generation is thus key to maintaining agriculture run by individual farmers – women and men. International Youth Day, which we are currently celebrating, focuses on the role of young people in eradicating poverty and achieving sustainable development through sustainable consumption and production.
Young people in rural areas are key actors in maintaining family farming and helping to eradicate poverty.
The IYFF+10 initiative is therefore intended to devise and implement agricultural, economic and social policies focusing specifically on the needs of rural youth. Such policies of support to the community must make it easier for young farmers to access productive resources (land, water, credit, markets, appropriate technology, etc.) and must improve their living conditions, thus turning Family Farming into an attractive occupation that will help prevent the flight from the land to the cities.
IYFF+10, as it continues to push Family Farming in the wake of International Year of Family Farming 2014, is giving priority both to the role of young people and to the role of women farmers. And it needs to be said that young women face greater difficulties than men in rural areas. If that gender barrier is to be overcome, special attention must be paid to ways of guaranteeing women’s access to the services made available under rural development policies.
The countryside is being leached of young people
There is no denying that is a matter of urgency to address the status of young people and the generational handover in arable and livestock farming, fishing, pastoralism and aquaculture. According to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), half of the farmers in the United States are 55 or older, while the average age in sub-Saharan Africa is 60.
Rural young people are the ones most likely to emigrate because of the lack of well-paid employment and opportunities for personal and professional development. They are moving from rural areas to urban areas in search of jobs in non-farming sectors (Ginsburg et al, 2014; Awumbila et al, 2015). In rural areas young women and men do not have enough access to quality education and opportunities for a decent livelihood, and that means that many of them find informal urban employment attractive (Deshingkar and Grimm, 2005).
According to the FAO, rural young people in sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa are particularly disadvantaged. The relatively low official rates of youth unemployment in sub-Saharan Africa disguise the large number of low-quality informal jobs, while North Africa has the highest youth unemployment rates in the world.
It is clear that rural young people represent productive potential that is essential for the economic and social development of rural communities and therefore of the society to which they belong.
On International Youth Day 2016, we stress the need to provide support for the handover to a new generation in the countryside in order to maintain a living rural community with both women and men farmers.
More information:
- International Youth Day https://www.un.org/development/desa/undesavoice/get-involved/2016/08/