A/HRC/16/63 production. This has resulted in very high levels of malnutrition, especially micronutrient malnutrition, among altiplano families because their diet is inadequate.12 9. In Ethiopia, chronic food insecurity persists in the country, which is predominantly agrarian, and poverty is significantly higher in rural areas than in urban areas.13 Agriculture is still predominantly rain-dependent and only 3 per cent of irrigable land is currently irrigated, contributing to a high vulnerability to drought. Many Ethiopian farmers do not produce enough even for their own subsistence. Two thirds of household farm on less than 0.5 hectare, insufficient to support a family, and these holdings are becoming smaller and smaller owing to the fast rate of population growth.14 The poorest and most destitute are now mainly dependent on wage labour in other people’s fields. With few opportunities for wage labour or opportunities for off-farm employment to earn income, many people simply do not get enough to eat. C. Landless people working as tenant farmers or agricultural labourers 10. Approximately 20 per cent of the world’s hungry are landless. Most work as tenant farmers or agricultural labourers. Tenant farmers usually have to pay high rents and have little security of possession from season to season. Agricultural labourers usually work for extremely low wages that are insufficient to feed their families, and often have to migrate from one insecure, informal job to another.15 This is for example the case in Bangladesh16 and India.17 11. In Bangladesh, more than two thirds of rural people are now landless (owning less than 0.2 hectares) and landlessness is increasing rapidly owing to demography and inheritance laws that divide holdings into ever smaller plots, but also to land-grabbing by powerful people.18 Many of the landless work as agricultural labourers, often for pitiful wages, and the rest are sharecroppers who work the land of absentee landlords in exploitative relationships in which 50 per cent of the crop must be passed back to the landlord. Seasonal crises of hunger are still experienced in the northern, more arid regions of Bangladesh, particularly during the monga, the lean season between crops, when no agricultural work is available for landless labourers. Increasing landlessness is contributing to migration to urban areas in search of work, forcing many people to live in the terrible conditions of the slums of Dhaka. 12. In India, the hungry and malnourished are primarily children, women and men living in rural areas and dependent on agriculture, working as casual workers but also as sharecroppers and tenant or marginal farmers with less than one hectare of land.19 Agricultural wages are very low and increasingly precarious, the payment of minimum wages is always enforced, and many people lack work during the agricultural lean season. 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Objetivos de desarrollo del milenio. La Paz, situación actual, evaluación y perspectivas, 2007. International Food Policy Research Institute, Ending the Cycle of Famine in Ethiopia (Washington, D.C., 2003). Rahmato D. and Kidanu A., “Consultations with the Poor: A study to inform the World Development Report (2000/01) on Poverty and Development”, National Report, Ethiopia, 1999. IFAD, Rural Poverty Report 2001. E/CN.4/2004/10/Add.1, para. 9. E/CN.4/2006/44/Add.2, paras. 10-11. Rahman A.T.R., Human Security in Bangladesh: In Search of Justice and Dignity (Bangladesh, UNDP, 2002). Sujoy Chakravarty and Sajal A. Dand, Food Insecurity in India: Causes and Dimensions, April 2005. Available from www.iimahd.ernet.in/publications/data/2005-04-01sujoy.pdf. 5