1. COMMITTEE: Environment Council<br />QUESTION OF: Effective method to reduce poverty<br />SUBMITTED BY: Nigeria<br />CO-SUBMITTED BY: ECOWAS, Gulf of Guinea Security Committee, NEPAD<br />African Development Bank, South Africa and Egypt, OPEC.<br /> Aware of the seriousness of poverty on Nigeria rather than deforestation, and the necessity of the challenge of reducing urban poverty. Between 1990 and 2000, Nigeria lost an average of 409,700 hectares of forest per year.<br />Realizing that deforestation in poverty, particularly the number of poor in rural areas intensely drop from 26.3million to 22.8million, while urban poverty rose from 9.7million to 11.9million.<br />Noting with deep concern that extreme poverty increased nationally from 10million to 14million, with a tripling of headcount in urban areas. Income distribution also worsened. National poverty would have declined by 13.6% rather than 8.9% unless worsening income distribution.<br />Emphasizing that apart from regional characteristics, poverty is strongly influenced by education, age and nature of employment.<br />Keeping in mind that Participatory Poverty Assessment indicates that the poor children increasingly do not attend School as they consider quality of education weak and ponder education increasing employment prospects minimal.<br />Reaffirming the necessity according to World Bank Nigeria will require a strong and focused emphasis on regional aspects of economic growth.<br />Calls upon all member nations, Nigeria is lack of oil revenue, subsidy so that unable to implement on deforestation issue that affect neighbor countries.<br />Calls for government to use resources more efficiently, and divide the portion of government in both recurrent and capital budget in health and education. Organize fiscal expenditures in social sector. Totally resources have not been used efficiently, resulting in serious deterioration in the quantity and quality of services and minimized benefits to the poor.<br />Request to National Consumer Survey to set the reliable data on agricultural activities, crop mix, quality of land, value of assets such as livestock reliance on wage labor, which is essential for understanding the feature of poverty of 70% of the poor whose main activity is agriculture. National Integrated Survey of Households needs to be updated based on user demands. Technical assistance should focus on couraging current efforts to improve data quality and supply to users in a timely manner.<br />Agrees to National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS), Nigeria’s home-grown poverty alleviation medium-term (2003-2007) strategy, which has taken from the country’s long-term aim on poverty diminution, wealth initiation employment origination, and value orientation. It is a nationally-coordinated framework of action in close creation with the position and local governments (with their State Economic Empowerment and<br />Development Strategy, SEEDS) and other stakeholders to fortify on the achievements of the last four years (1999-2003). Fortunately, a number of the programs of the current administration are regular with the major force of NEEDS.<br />Further more Nigeria think about reducing deforestation as we carry out the program of eliminating poverty more strongly. Then ponder on environment issue for deforestation occurred due to poverty.<br />