Poverty In Serbia

Serbia officially known as the Republic of Serbia is a landlocked country situated at the cross lands of central and southeast Europe in the southern Pannonian plain and the central Balkans. It borders Hungary at the north, Romania and Bulgaria to the east, Macedonia to the south, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro to the west and claims a border with Albania through the disputed territory Kosovo. Serbia has around 7 million residents living in it. Serbia ranks 84th at the GDP rate with an amount of 37.739 billion. Its economy is based on various services (51.1%of GDP), industry (38.5% of GDP), and agriculture (10.4 of GDP).
In Serbia 9% of the population lives in poverty (about 630,000 people) and every fourth resident is at the verge of poverty.

One in four people in Serbia lives below the poverty line, making it the poorest country in Europe. However, poverty statistics alone do little to illustrate Serbia’s complex problems that make destitution so prevalent. Many external and internal factors, some of which are uncontrollable, heavily contribute to poverty in Serbia.
2. In 2014, Serbia’s population and economy took a massive hit. In May of that year, flooding caused serious damage within Serbia — many towns were destroyed and thousands of people displaced. The Serbian government estimated the total damage at 1.5 billion euros. The GDP growth rate decreased 4.4 percent to an alarming negative 1.8 percent. While those numbers have since begun to increase, there’s no getting around that such a devastating event will take years to recover from.
3. The areas hit hardest by the natural disaster — small southern towns and rural regions — had the highest incidence of poverty before the flood. These areas are dependent on smallholder farming and often have less access to education than major cities. In 2014, the southeastern region of Serbia had poverty rates close to four times higher than those in Belgrade, the nation’s capital

Delivery of support to small-scale, family-run farms got under way: FAO has helped over 32 000 beneficiaries with agricultural input (provision of crop seeds and fruit-tree saplings, fertilizer, animal feed and livestock, a variety of farming equipment, beehives and construction of greenhouses) to restart their agricultural activities. To prepare for the future, a training workshop on disaster risk reduction and management organized by FAO in Fruska Gora introduced a new National Disaster Risk Management