IFPRI Forum

March 2007

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The first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) calls for halving the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day and suffering from hunger between 1990 and 2015. Anyone who has worked in development knows that this goal is enormous, but the global community has taken on this challenge and committed itself to achieving this target. Halving the proportion of poor people will require ensuring that hundreds of millions of people, many of whom have already been the subjects of various development plans and programs, gain livelihoods that will allow them to live healthy and productive lives free of hunger. Yet, besides raising the challenge of reaching half of the world's poor people in an effective way by 2015, the goal also raises an uncomfortable question: What will become of the people not addressed by the goal—the other half?

The hungry and poor who are "easy" to reach are already benefiting from global efforts to reduce hunger and poverty. So who are the poorest people—those who are so difficult to reach with current and past approaches? Why are their situations so dire? How can they be reached?

These questions have long concerned us at IFPRI. We have decided to organize a research-based conference and consultation process to try to find answers to some of these difficult questions. The conference, "Taking Action for the World's Poor and Hungry People," is being organized in conjunction with the Chinese State Council Leading Group Office on Poverty Alleviation and Development (LGOPAD). This multistakeholder conference will examine how best to reach the hunger and poverty MDG and to go beyond it to ultimately end hunger and absolute poverty. The International Poverty Reduction Center in China, IFPRI, and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) are co-hosts of the conference, to be held October 17-19, 2007, in Beijing, China. Planning for the conference is being guided by a distinguished Advisory Committee, which met in Beijing on March 20, 2007. The sheer numbers of people likely to remain in poverty after 2015 remain staggering. Worldwide, an estimated 700 million people are projected to remain extremely poor in 2015, and about 600 million people to go hungry.

There are indications that the poorest people may have different social and economic characteristics than the people who have made it out of poverty in recent decades. The poorest may be harder to reach because, for instance, they may live in failing states or may be caught in poverty traps. It appears that reaching them will require new and different actions. But what should those actions be?

This conference will bring to bear the latest research on new strategies and actions to end extreme hunger and poverty. It will take stock of progress in reducing poverty and hunger and assess who the remaining poorest and hungry people are. It will examine why poverty and hunger persist in these groups and look at the experiences of different countries and actors in tackling poverty and hunger. It will assess what approaches and strategies have worked and the optimal mix of policies and investments in different contexts. This gathering of a wide range of stakeholders will also allow for intensified exchange of lessons between countries that have been successful at reducing hunger and poverty on the one hand and the rest of the world on the other hand. Finally, the conference will contribute to identifying how actions to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger can be accelerated or scaled up, and how innovative solutions can be designed and implemented for and with the poorest and hungry people.

Once the conference is over, we do not intend to let the results rest on the shelf. Rather, our goal is to feed information emerging from the conference into key policymaking and decision-making processes, where it can contribute to adjusting existing strategies and policies and to developing and implementing new ones. We want to see the lessons applied to help speed up, scale up, and transfer successful practices and experiences.

In preparing this conference, we are fortunate to have the support of a consortium of cosponsors, made up of countries, regional banks, bilateral agencies, foundations, and nongovernmental organizations including, besides the Government of China, the Asian Development Bank, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Canadian International Development Agency, Deutsche Welthungerhilfe (German Agro-Action), the European Commission, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Co-operation and Development with Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (BMZ/GTZ), the International Development Research Centre, and UNICEF's China country office.

The Millennium Project's report states that the MDGs are only a way-station on the path to ending absolute poverty by 2025. Our thinking about how to achieve this goal must build on the best available research and experience, and the time to start thinking is now.