Rural Lifestyles and Income Strategies
are Adaptations to Local Resource Opportunities
- the Result is Self Sufficiency

Twenty or thirty years ago people thought most poor rural families earned their living by farming. Then studies showed that off-farm income from wage labor, craft work, small-scale trading, and money sent by relatives was actually more important. That cast rural poverty in a rather different light.

Now, a new World Bank report called 'Counting on the Environment, Forest Incomes, and the Rural Poor' has highlighted a third major source of income - collecting fuel wood, wild foods, and other forest products. It says that, on average, such activities provide roughly one fifth of poor rural families' income.

The report, by P. Vedeld, A. Angelsen, E. Sjaastad, and G. Kobugabe Berg from the Norwegian Agricultural University, synthesizes data from 54 household income studies from 17 countries, mostly in East and Southern Africa and South Asia. Wet, semi-humid, and dry forest areas were about equally represented among the studies, although most humid forest cases involved indigenous peoples in Latin America.

About two-fifths of the income from these activities comes from harvesting wild foods (bushmeat, insects, and wild fruits and vegetables), while another third comes from fuel wood. Fodder, medicinal plants, and timber provided much of the rest. The income is about evenly split between cash and products consumed directly. Wealthier families harvest more forest products. However, these activities generate a much higher proportion of poorer families' total income. Those villagers with lower educational levels get more of their income from forests.

The authors note that many of the studies reviewed had weak methodologies. More sophisticated survey techniques are needed, but that will require additional funding. Nonetheless, based on what we know already there is little doubt that rural incomes are higher than existing statistics suggest. Poverty Reduction Strategies need to help ensure that rural households don't lose those sources of income that are crucial both to survival and to self sufficiency.

It is a sad fact of life that a significant proportion of people who live in highly developed western countries tend to look with scorn at rural people who live in relative poverty, as if their life styles are somehow "their fault". When rural people make good use of their local resources, this often consists of selling products both within and outside the country to supplement their meager incomes. Such is the case with those people who live on the Atlantic coast of Canada and make use of both fish and seals. The fish are a staple commodity for coastal people, while the seals are harvested for supplemental income during the early spring, when it is impossible to fish because of ice conditions. Here also, local people make use of local forest products when these are available, but seals are an indispensable part of the food gathering cycle. Newfoundlanders and Inuit people eat seal meat. The sale of the pelts and fat, however, tides them over a bleak, long season without any income.

Urban Americans and Europeans behave as though this use of a resource in times of scarcity is somehow immoral. It is not that the seals are scarce or even endangered. They are over-abundant, thanks to the loss of a market for their pelts in Europe back in the 1980s and through 1996. Finally, new markets were found and Canadians can once again earn a decent living in the spring of the year. This finances the start of the new fishing season, for Newfoundlanders, and brings hope to Labrador Native people who have no other source of cash.

All societies live in the global economy. All people deserve to participate in it in the most benign and efficient manner they can devise. Local abundant resources make this possible. Whether it is forest foods, or sea foods, rural people "make do" with whatever tradition has taught them is available. Their self sufficiency should be universally applauded, rather than scorned and held up to criticism. Cultural and economic diversity in the use of resources helps to keep all resource gathering activities sustainable. IWMC applauds all those rural people who know how to take care of themselves through skillful use of their own natural resources. This is "economic development" at its best.