The Belt and Road Initiative drives global poverty reduction

Opportunity: Communication via the Belt and Road Initiative

Concerning the role of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in agricultural cooperation, Ana Paula de la O Campos thinks that the BRI provides a great opportunity to learn from China, about how it has used agriculture to lift people out of poverty since most of the poor in China live on crop production, livestock and fisheries. “Farmers are not only farmers, they also need other interventions for them to be lifted out of poverty beyond agriculture they need. We need to lift the standards of living of rural people, up to the standards of, I wouldn’t say to the cities, but very close to the cities. They need access to services, they need access to social protection, and they need health and education and good infrastructure. So these are the things that China has also considered as part of their strategy for poverty reduction that we can learn from,” she said.

Maya Takagi holds that the BRI is a big opportunity to develop a good connection of market, infrastructure and industry development, to connect continents, and to increase economic growth of those very different countries. “Different countries are in different stages of development and in different stages of their poverty reduction strategies. So there’s no one single solution. The initiative provides an opportunity to learn from each other, learn from the interaction, and interact in finding common solutions,” she said.