Although the economy has stabilized and grown in recent years, the country is one of the poorest in the world. Gross national income (GNI) per capita was $440 in 2005. Almost 40 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line.
About two thirds of Kyrgyzstan’s population live in rural areas, and livestock breeding is the mainstay of most rural households outside the few major valleys. The rural population includes three quarters of the country’s poor — 1.8 million poor people — who live mainly in remote and mountainous areas.
More than half of the population works in agriculture. The sector is still the backbone of the economy, though its share in GDP declined to 30 per cent in 2005.
In the early 1990s, in the newly independent republic, poor rural people were particularly vulnerable to the effects of the economic transition from a command economy to a free market economy. The transition severely disrupted agriculture and increased rural poverty.
Kyrgyz farmers are still struggling to overcome the difficulties that arose when the Soviet support system collapsed, the economy contracted sharply and gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 50 per cent. The shift from a monoculture system based on sheep-raising and wool production to a multi-crop system resulted in a decline in agriculture in the years after independence. Recovery has been slow. Although the agricultural sector is showing signs of growth, poverty persists in rural areas. Rural people’s access to basic public services such as running water, public sewerage, health and education has deteriorated.
The country’s highly successful agrarian reform redistributed land to individual farmers and family-owned farming enterprises, and about 70 per cent of the cultivable land is now privately owned. In the early 1990s large numbers of unemployed workers returned to rural areas and turned to farming for a livelihood. Small-scale subsistence farming increased, but rural poverty grew along with it because resource-poor and untrained farmers could not produce enough for an adequate income.
In an agricultural sector dominated by livestock production, growth depends on efficient use of pastures, which are one of the country’s major resources. But the condition of pastures has deteriorated significantly. Winter pastures are being overused and have become severely degraded, and summer pastures are underused. Pastures around villages and along roads are heavily overgrazed. The root of the problem is in the fragmentation of administrative control over pastures, which inhibits the seasonal movement of herds from winter pastures to more distant summer pastures at higher elevations. Production has decreased and this has had a negative effect on the livelihoods of livestock breeders and other agricultural workers.
Who are the country’s poor rural people and why are they poor?
The country’s poorest people include subsistence farmers and livestock breeders in remote rural areas. Rural people who sank into poverty during the economic transition have found it difficult to rise above the poverty line. An increase in their incomes depends largely on an increase in production, but they face a range of constraints:
farmers do not have sufficient training in the techniques of land management, cultivation and animal husbandry poor practices have led to deterioration of natural resources and especially to degradation of the pastures that are crucial to livestock production livestock nutrition is inadequate and veterinary services are insufficient, with the result that parasites and diseases affecting livestock go largely untreated rural people lack access to marketing channels and markets farmers do not have access to credit and the other financial services that would allow them to invest capital in improving their farms and livestock Where are the country’s poor rural people?
The country’s poorest people are in its most remote rural areas, where infrastructure is poor and there is little or no access to markets and social and financial services.
Sources: IFAD, World Bank
http://www.ruralpovertyportal.org/country/home/tags/kyrgyzstan