Rural poverty in the Philippines Essay Example

About half of the Philippines’ 88 million people live in rural areas.

Poverty is most severe and most widespread in these areas and almost 80 per cent of the country’s poor people live there. Agriculture is the primary and often only source of income for poor rural people, most of whom depend on subsistence farming and fishing for their livelihoods. In general, illiteracy, unemployment and the incidence of poverty are higher among indigenous peoples and people living in the upland areas. Overall, more than a third of the people in the Philippines live in poverty.The poorest of the poor are the indigenous peoples, small-scale farmers who cultivate land received through agrarian reform, landless workers, fishers, people in upland areas and women. There are substantial differences in the level of poverty between the regions and provinces and the poverty gap between urban and rural a