The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation has hailed a landmark United Nations General Assembly resolution adopting the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas, FAO said on Tuesday in a statement.
The Declaration, which the UN General Assembly adopted on Monday aims to safeguard the rights of all rural populations including peasants, agricultural and rural workers and indigenous peoples, who suffer disproportionately from hunger and poverty. It also recognising their contribution to sustainable development and biodiversity and the challenges they face, said the statement.
"FAO welcomes the adoption of the declaration. Rural people have been consistently left behind - they make up the vast majority of the world's poor, generally have lower wages and less access to water, energy, social protection and other services that are essential for their sustainable development," said Carla Mucavi, director of the FAO Liaison Office to the United Nations in New York.
"This is an opportunity to change this reality," Mucavi said.
Specific rights enshrined in the Declaration include the right to adequate food, land and water. The document also upholds the need to respect the cultural identity and traditional knowledge of rural people as well as the need to provide social protection and to ensure gender equality in rural areas.
The adoption of the Declaration is the culmination of an inclusive negotiation process led by Bolivia and supported by FAO that lasted six years, which is linked to most of the principles and guidelines adopted by the Committee on World Food Security and various FAO bodies.
The themes and values underpinning the Declaration also relate to other aspects of FAO's work including with indigenous peoples, the agency said.
Globally, the poverty rate in rural areas is more than three times higher than in urban areas, and rural areas account for over half of the world's population and 79 per cent of the total poor, according to a recent World Bank report.
Seventy percent of the two billion people in the world without basic sanitation services live in rural areas and the access rate to energy in rural areas is of approximately 75 percent compared to 96 percent in urban areas, FAO noted
Only about twenty per cent of agricultural workers have access to basic social protection and their wages are generally low, paid late and not periodically adjusted, said FAO.
The Declaration is also expected to have a positive impact on the livelihoods of family farmers, who produce over 70 per cent of the world's food-and over 80 per cent in developing countries-in terms of value, according to FAO.
