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Rural poverty in Mongolia Poverty is a recent reality in Mongolia. Until about 1990 there were virtually no poor people in rural areas. The government and rural collectives made sure that everyone was supplied with basic goods and access to a full range of public services. Poverty has been a direct consequence of the transition to a market economy in the 1990s, after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Mongolia's centrally planned economy. Privatization of industry and state farms brought high levels of unemployment. Benefits and assistance dried up. Incomes shrank, inflation devoured purchasing power and people had to bear the cost of health and education services. Presently, one in three people in Mongolia are poor, and the number of poor people grows as the income gap widens. Poverty is becoming entrenched not only in urban centres but also in rural areas, where about half of the country’s poor people live. Who are Mongolia's rural poor people?Rural poor people in Mongolia include:
Poverty is more likely to affect women than men. In 2002, more than 55,000 households in Mongolia were headed by women, 250 per cent more than in 1990. One in four of these families have six or more children. At least half of the households headed by women are poor. Where are rural poor people in Mongolia?Rural poor people are scattered, isolated and highly mobile. They are mainly in five of Mongolia's 21 aimags, or provinces: Huvsgul, Arhangai and Bayan-Olgiy in the north-west; Dorno-Gobi in the south-east and Bayanhongor in the south-central part of the country. Within the aimags, poverty seems to be most deeply entrenched in rural district centres called soums, which are settlements made up of a few hundred families. Half of all people in rural areas are semi-nomadic herders, who move from one remote pastureland to another, living with their families in traditional round felt tents called ger. The other half of rural people live in soums. People tend to move their herds closer to soums so they can have easier access to health and education services and basic supplies. Why are they poor?Most rural poor people are herders. Although livestock production is still the principal source of livelihood for rural people, the number of livestock per herder is decreasing dramatically. It shrank by more than half between 1990 and 2000. In that decade the number of herders swelled from about 150,000 in 1990 to about 420,000 in 1999, an increase of more than 180 per cent. The size of the livestock holdings of most families, particularly newcomers who have migrated from urban centres, is well below the subsistence level. For a sustainable livelihood over the long term, a family of herders needs at least ten heads of cattle or yak or 70 sheep. Yet when livestock collectives were disbanded in the early 1990s, about 20 per cent of families, many of them headed by women, received fewer than ten animals. Smaller herds barely support a simple life at the subsistence level, which is permanently threatened by the fragile condition of pastureland, severe winters and endemic animal diseases. To cope in the short term, herders at the subsistence level may have to sell animals. With fewer animals they find it even harder to survive. Herders are among the poorest of the poor in Mongolia. Source: IFAD |
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