National Committee for Arid Zones

The fields are barren.

Poor ground, you say?

And there the land was poor and wild game rare.

Step one is that the Taliban prey on families that are large, that are poor, that live in rural areas.

Below the hillside was a bare plain.

Yes, stranger, you're dead right. Awful poor ground.

This is a rugged and barren landscape, yet there are quite a few spiders here.

Intensive farming is depleting soils.

clinging to rock, and eating it too ... transforming barren land.

Deterioration of marginal lands has repercussions for populated regions and productive lands, and so Governments often make major investments in economically marginal regions.

Now, we're talking about a continent that is not poor.

Somalia is mostly a barren land with long coasts on the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.

This piece, which is called Flipped Earth she was interested in taking the sky and using it to cleanse barren ground.

40. The rural population in the country s five districts consists mainly of nomadic herdsmen living precariously on pastures depleted by drought and overgrazing.

Agricultural activity in Anguilla is limited due to a combination of factors, including poor soil, the small amount of arable land and irregular rainfall.

Technically speaking, to be decadent is to be weak, diminished in energy, sterile.

Because the land is so infertile, they largely are shepherds, which occasions regular, low intensity physical activity.

And he had a dream that he would build a housing community on this barren piece of land using patient capital, but he continued to pay a price.

Unsustainable land use practices constitute one of the major threats to sustainable food production on much of the Earth's marginally productive lands.

Demographic growth over territory that consisted largely of unproductive and fragile land and infertile soil, and the absence of soil replenishment had eroded the natural capital and exerted excessive pressure on existing natural resources.

To give just one example, in Peru harsh local environments, characterized by depleted saline soils and high altitudes, have traditionally caused many crops to fail.

But what Galileo saw was a rocky, barren world, which he expressed through his watercolor painting.

Pockets of extreme poverty within countries are common in all regions which include geographically inaccessible areas, remote rural communities and urban slums.

In fact, the poorest areas were not rural areas but areas adjacent to large cities.

In collaboration with UNESCO and the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), as well as with other stakeholders, UNU has developed a research project in Egypt and Tunisia, amongst other Arab speaking countries, on sustainable management of marginal drylands.

And what we found this area is one of the poorest parts of Britain.

We've been familiar for 40 years with this image the fragile beauty of land, ocean and clouds, contrasted with the sterile moonscape on which the astronauts left their footprints.

They are located in fragile ecosystems and have been subject to strong degradation for many years, owing to environmental stress (arid climate, poor soils, strong erosion, overgrazing and demographic expansion).

The incidence of poverty is higher in rural than in urban areas (54 per cent of rural and 30 per cent of urban households can be classified as poor).

Li Zhengyin said frankly that we should win the anti poverty war successfully. The poverty alleviation through consumption was one of the important forms of poverty alleviation, which would help the people in poor areas to get rid of poverty and increase income. We intensely hope that friends from all circles will 'buy products from the poor areas and help the poor' .

Within the framework of the rehabilitation of degraded lands, including integrated water resources management, UNESCO is working on a new interregional project, Sustainable Management of Marginal Drylands (SUMAMAD) , which will benefit north African and Asian countries.

Water stressed regions like Ethiopia and Sudan can adapt, at least in part, through improved technologies such as drip irrigation, rainwater harvesting, improved water storage facilities, deep wells, and agro forestry techniques that make best use of scarce rainfall. Better land management practices (the re planting of degraded forests, for example) can recharge underground water aquifers.

One course of action must be to help impoverished African regions to adapt to climate change and to escape the poverty trap. Water stressed regions like Ethiopia and Sudan can adapt, at least in part, through improved technologies such as drip irrigation, rainwater harvesting, improved water storage facilities, deep wells, and agro forestry techniques that make best use of scarce rainfall.

The second, or a different kind of remoteness is that within the large metropolitan areas all over the world, you have pockets, like slums, or shantytowns, or poorer areas, which are socially and economically remote from the rest of the city, so it's us and them.

In slum areas like Cité Soleil and very poor urban areas for example, around Gonaïves children are held hostage under the brutal and criminal rule of local gangs.

In view of the decisive role of the regions in the diagnosis and treatment of poverty, the anti poverty strategies have been focused on regional development.

On the other hand, little land is available for housing and agriculture, which makes people use unproductive and or inappropriate hillsides for agricultural production and housing damaging the environment even further.

17. Agricultural activities, limited by infertile soil, low rainfall and high labour costs, have nearly doubled over the past five years, with 10 large farms totalling over 100 acres now in service.

The central region has the highest rates of poverty (41 per cent) and extreme poverty (57.1 per cent). That region's rate of extreme poverty is the worst in Nicaragua, at 17 times the rate in Managua and three times the rate in the other Pacific departments.

Similarly, rural areas have 60.5 per cent of poor households and only 22.7 per cent of not poor households according to the intra group percentage calculations shown in the following table.

So it was like a green inkblot spreading out from the building turning barren land back into biologically productive land and in that sense, going beyond sustainable design to achieve restorative design.

Health statistics also show that poor children in urban areas are far worse off than the rural poor.

HOUSEHOLDS BY POVERTY LEVEL AND RURAL Source DANE.

Poverty in Sri Lanka is predominately a rural phenomenon.