The World Bank and the Small Farmer

Abstract

The problem of rural poverty in the Third World is severe. Millions of men and women farm tiny parcels of poor or exhausted soils inadequate to support them at a decent level. Millions more work as tenants, paying a large proportion of their produce to nonworking landowners, or as laborers who have no land of their own to farm and who must sell their labor for a pittance on a daily or seasonal basis. Still more millions have been driven to seek a precarious existence in city slums because they find no possibility of supporting life in the countryside.

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