Development Strategy to Empower Rural Farmers and Prevent HIV

Introduction from the report

With rural populations representing between 70 and 80 percent of the total population in some South East Asian countries, it is clear that the future of national HIV epidemics will largely be determined through rural-urban linkages and inside rural areas. Because agriculture, inparticular rice farming, is still the foundation of the economy in much of the region, it is critical to build HIV resilience at the grassroots level of rural, farm communities to avert potential, explosive HIV epidemics. Building this resilience can be achieved throughdevelopment strategies if they are designed to reduce the HIV vulnerability in the populations that these strategies are intended to serve. Within such a challenging context, the search for effective strategies ensuring that development results also in HIV prevention is under way.

This is why the UNDP South East Asia HIV and Development Project (UNDP-SEAHIV) initiated a pilot collaboration with Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations(FAO)- Cambodia. The objective was to introduce development in such a way that it would also actively contribute to HIV prevention in Cambodia's rice farming communities. The objective is achieved through initiating a process of farmer empowerment through Farmer Life Schools (FLS.) The goal is that the farmers will effectively protect themselves, their families and communities from HIV infection.

The central idea lies in promoting a holistic development strategy, rather than a narrow sector based one e.g. agriculture based. In this holistic development approach, farmers examine their life context and situation instead of just increasing the yields of their rice fields. Withoutdevelopment and due to their constraints, farmers tend to adopt a day to day, hand to mouth crisis management strategy of survival in which there is little room for concern about HIV prevention. However, once farmers understand they can have a future and even shape theirown future to some extent, investing in the future becomes meaningful. As the farmers' world view evolves and they build future-oriented strategies, preventing HIV, along with other risks that threaten their lives and survival, falls naturally into place.

We will first examine why a holistic development strategy is important in rural Cambodia where resources are scarce. It is useful to have a general idea of the context in which the FLS are established. The second section presents the tools to empower farmers. The third section examines how the empowerment of farmers results in their becoming concerned about HIV prevention from a holistic development perspective.

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