FAO: Beating worldwide poverty requires 'nuanced' approach

The world's march toward reducing extreme poverty continues to move forward, according to one of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)'s top development experts, while also cautioning against a one-size-fits-all approach toward improving - or even measuring - the problem.

Jomo, who prefers to use only one name, FAO's assistant director general and its coordinator for economic and social development, spoke with Xinhua in a wide-ranging interview related to development.

During the exclusive interview, Jomo praised China's economic development and its achievement in reducing poverty at home.

According to figures from the Poverty & Equity Databank, the number of poor people in China fell from 750 million in 1990 to fewer than 200 million in 2014, even as the country's overall population grew from 1.14 billion to 1.36 billion over the same span.

He said Chinese school feeding programs, for example, were promising, helping to draw regions out of the cycle of poverty by providing healthy and balanced meals for children and providing steady demand for produce from local farmers.

But the Malaysian economist also said that China's strategy for alleviating poverty might not be a good fit in other countries.

"China started its development projects in the countryside with it spreading from there, and over time it was a case of a rising tide lifting all the boats," Jomo said.

"It worked in China, where the gap between the rich and the poor was not large at the start but it only grew with development," Jomo continued. "But it would be a bigger problem in a country where the gap between the rich and the poor is already large."

Jomo told Xinhua the problem is that the reasons for poverty vary from country to country, and so different countries would need a tailored approach to their specific needs.

"A doctor would not prescribe the same cure to patients with different types of health problems, and that is the way we must look at the challenge of confronting extreme poverty," Jomo said. "This is a much nuanced problem, and it requires nuanced solutions."

Jomo, who has visited China regularly, specifically mentioned China's investments in hospitals and other facilities in Africa and elsewhere as mostly positive, and he noted the technical contributions such as those of Chinese Nobel Prize winning scientist Tu Youyou, whose work helped treat Malaria.

Jomo said the problem of extreme poverty around the globe is undoubtedly easing with time, but he noted that even measuring progress on that point helped highlight the difficulty of the issue.

He said that World Bank figures showed that the development goal of halving extreme chronic hunger in the world compared to 1990 levels was reached in 2008, while FAO's own figures show the world is still a little short of that goal.