INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION FROM SOUTHERN COUNTRIES RURAL AREAS : WHICH IMPACT ON AGRICULTURAL AND RURAL SUSTAINABILITY ?

Denis Requier-Desjardins (1)

1 IEP Toulouse - Sciences Po Toulouse - Institut d'études politiques de Toulouse

Relationship between migration, development and agriculture is an old issue which dates back to Lewis and his analysis of rural-urban migration in developing countries. The economic analysis of migration (especially the so-called new economics of labour migration – NELM) has strong connections with the microeconomics of peasant or rural households. NELM particularly focuses on contracts between migrants and their remaining family or community, which leads to remittances. These migrant networks have also been analysed, using the tools of economic sociology or social capital theory, applied to Southern rural societies. If rural migrants in southern countries keep going to the burgeoning cities of most of these countries, Southern rural migration is nowadays very often an international migration, either southsouth or south-north as international migrants coming from the south are mostly rural. Consequently remittances constitutes now a rapidly growing macroeconomic component of the balance of payments of these countries, but also of the non-farm income of rural areas, raising the issue of their contribution to development and poverty alleviation either at a national or local level. In its 2008 WDR on agriculture and development , the World Bank states that migration is one of three possible exits from poverty for rural households, along with the rise of smallholder agriculture productivity and wage opportunities in rural areas. On the other side, in some places, rural livelihoods tend to be more and more disconnected from farm income and agriculture, international migration reinforcing this trend. This paper would like to address the issue of relationship between the development of international migration and its impact on rural and agricultural sustainability. First it will present the main quantitative data on international migration and remittances in Southern countries rural areas. Second it will make a state-of-the-art survey of the debate on relationship between international migration and development. Third, on this basis, it will assess its impact on agricultural and rural sustainability, either social, economic or environmental. It will conclude that, although the impact of migration and remittances on agricultural development is contrasted, international migration and corresponding remittances can broaden the array of opportunities for the population of some rural areas and thus contribute to local sustainability

Mots clés: International migration; sustainability; agriculture; rurality

Domaines: Agriculture, économie et politique

Denis Requier-Desjardins. INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION FROM SOUTHERN COUNTRIES RURAL AREAS : WHICH IMPACT ON AGRICULTURAL AND RURAL SUSTAINABILITY ?. ISDA 2010, Jun 2010, Montpellier, France. 17 p. ⟨hal-00521365⟩