Poverty and Conservation: The New Century's “Peasant Question?”

By issuing its Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations has declared its intention to alleviate poverty and hunger at a global scale over the next decade. But, the perspectives and policies to achieve those goals have not addressed the failures of previous development efforts of this kind. Nor have the plans to meet the Millennium Development Goals paid sufficient attention to the costs of rural development for wild nature. This paper points up the absence of a new analytical framework for sustainability and an action program in favor of a poverty- and conservation-oriented rural development program to ensure that the benefits of multilateral development plans accrue to the truly poor and to the future of wild nature.