Hala Kilani
Daily Star staff

Lebanon and other countries in the Near East and North Africa (NENA) must adopt a “convincing” poverty-fighting strategy to obtain a share of the $30 billion that America and the European Union have pledged to invest in development.
This is why the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) proposed to members of NENA governments at a workshop in Beirut on Wednesday a strategy that is likely to be accepted by countries of the North.
The two-day workshop, organized by IFAD in cooperation with the Agriculture Ministry, is entitled Regional Rural Poverty Assessment and Strategic Opportunities Workshop.
Representatives of NENA countries discussed this strategy right after IFAD directors highlighted its main points and added their suggestions.
“Developed countries refuse to invest their money in states that don’t have effective poverty-fighting strategies because they are afraid that, due to corruption, their finances will go into pockets rather than into rural development,” said Taysir al-Ghanem, coordinator at IFAD’s Economic Policy and Resource Strategy Department.
According to Ghanem, after Sept. 11, Northern countries linked terrorism to poverty. Consequently, in an attempt to eradicate poverty, they decided to increase their $50 billion contribution to development to $80 billion during the Financing for Development Conference in Mexico two months ago.
“They based their decision on the belief that poverty was a breeding ground for extremism. So their increase in contributions was motivated more by self-interest rather than by morality,” Ghanem argued.
Since poverty is concentrated in rural areas, IFAD proposed a regional strategy that focuses on rural development through better resource management. The strategy also deals with empowerment of the rural poor, generating off-farm employment for them (especially for women and youth), and gender equity in access to resources.  When arriving at the country level, this regional strategy will be molded according to the specificity of each of the NENA states.
Poverty in Lebanon is concentrated in the North and the South, where development was mainly hampered by the Israeli occupation, said Abdel Majid Slama, IFAD’s NENA director.
Agriculture Minister Ali Abdullah told The Daily Star that IFAD was already investing here with loans totalling $50 million and working with the Ministry of Agriculture on irrigation projects.  IFAD is also funding research development for agricultural guidance and backing infrastructure projects and animal production, the minister said.
“But the agricultural and economic crises are bigger than IFAD’s projects,” he added.
On legal alternatives to hashish crops, the minister said that the Food and Agriculture Organization carried out a study on the development of the Bekaa that covered this issue.
“A project proposal will soon be formulated to raise funding for the implementation of the study,” Abdullah said.
One of the local farmers complained about IFAD interest rates that once reached 9.5 percent, asking if the organization was considering lower rates on future loans. Slama defended IFAD, saying it used market rates for “stability” purposes.
“We’re not subsidizing the agricultural sector,” he said.
IFAD president Lennart Bage, who is here for the workshop, met President Emile Lahoud Wednesday and will tour the Bekaa projects funded by his organization on Thursday.
“Today about 1.2 billion people live in extreme poverty, trying to survive on less than $1 a day. Of those 1.2 billion human beings, 900 million live in rural areas, deriving their income mainly from agriculture and other related activities,” Bage said. “In order to reach the goal of halving poverty by the year 2015, it is therefore crucial that the productivity of both on-farm and off-farm activities be improved.”

Visa trouble hits palestinian delegates

A Palestinian delegation traveled to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) workshop with tourist visas on their Jordanian passports because their official visa formalities were complicated by Lebanese procedures.
“It’s really very disturbing for us to receive such treatment,” said Ismail Daiq, one of the delegation members.
All the other delegations obtained their visas without a problem, despite the fact that IFAD sent all the papers to the Lebanese authorities at the same time, 15 days ago.
The only explanation given by Lebanon was that “Palestinians had special procedures.”
However, the Palestinian delegation’s presence was very important to IFAD directors who wanted to discuss with them immediate financial assistance to rebuild the agricultural infrastructure of the West Bank and Gaza, especially in the wake of the recent Israeli offensive.
“Our projects in the West Bank and Gaza have been paralyzed, especially one which rehabilitates the infrastructure of water springs as Israel doesn’t want to share water with the Palestinians,” said Taysir al-Ghanem, coordinator at IFAD’s Economic Policy and Resource Strategy Department.
The Palestinian delegation stated that 80 percent of the water supply was used by Israel, leaving only 20 percent for the larger Palestinian population.
Near East and North Africa director Abdel Majid Slama said that the board of executives decided at its last meeting to act immediately and be one of the first donors.
“The rural poor were severely affected and the institutional infrastructure in the Palestinian territories also suffered,” Slama said. “All the assets that we constructed were lost, but we’re committed to restoring the spirit.”
Slama told The Daily Star that although Israel is a member of IFAD, the organization has still reached to the political sphere on this issue and applied the necessary pressure.
Daiq said that the Israelis have cut down 500-year-old olive trees and other trees that border half a kilometer of settlements in Gaza.
“It’s a really sad sight,” he said.
Daiq also said the Israelis are preventing raw materials necessary for implementing development projects from entering the Palestinian territories, and have destroyed the water networks in the West Bank and Gaza.
IFAD, which was founded in 1979, is currently doing microcredit projects and building greenhouses in the Palestinian territories.

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