Agricultural and rural development for reducing poverty and hunger in Asia: Past performance and priorities for the future

In the past 30 years Asia has experienced dynamic growth, structural transformation and achieved substantial poverty reduction. The extension of current trends will create a dramatically transformed Asia by 2015. The incidence of people living in poverty in the region has fallen from more than 50 percent in the mid-1970s to 18 percent in 2004 and the incidence of hunger from more than 30 percent to 16 percent. Currently the region is home to 520 million hungry people (as defned by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [FAO]) and 600 million poor people (as defned by..