Essay On Nonfarm Activities

Majority of the world’s poor live in rural areas of developing countries and depend mainly on agriculture and related activities for their livelihood. About Seventy-five percent of the world’s people who live on one US dollar or less per day work and live in rural areas. They do not earn enough even to cover their food needs. Most importantly they are confronted with limited economic opportunities and underdeveloped markets beside a plethora of other socio-economic problems. Resource pressure and environmental degradation create additional challenges to rural communities and their livelihoods, exacerbating conflict prone situations and accelerating rural urban migration flows (World Bank, 2008).

The concept “nonfarm activities” is defined in many ways by different authors. Kaija (2007) defined it as; the nonfarm sector refers to all other activities outside the farm sector and agricultural wage employment. The rural nonfarm sector not only contributes directly to rural households’ income that creates employment opportunities, but also it provides avenues for input supplies to farming sector and value-adding opportunities for the farm production. A well-off nonfarm sector should be able to provide employment to marginal farmers who leave agriculture because they could

Household incomes are lower and poverty rates are higher in rural areas than in urban areas. The poverty rate in rural areas is estimated as 34.0 percent, about 15 percentage points higher than the 19.1 rate in urban areas (World Bank, 2006). People are in a state of deprivation with regard to incomes, clothing, housing, healthcare, education, sanitary facilities and human rights. A number of factors could be responsible for this. These factors include rising population, shrinking agricultural land, increasing demand for water resources, widespread land degradation and inadequate