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1_ Introduction
Despite the overall decline in the number of people living in poverty over the past 15 years, approximately 55 million individuals in Brazil remained poor in 2005. Based on the IPEADATA1 database, the percentage of individuals considered poor in Brazil dropped from 42% in 1990 to 31% in 2005. Rural-tourban migration has accompanied and perhaps fueled this decline in poverty, so with only about 20% of the poor living in rural areas today (Azzoni et al., 2006), poverty in Brazil has become primarily an urban phenomenon. Still, the rural poor should not be neglected, particularly since they are so heavily concentrated in the Northeast of Brazil, where 70% (4.7 million) rural poor and 80% (1.8 million) of the extremely rural poor reside.2
In the SFRB, part of which lies in the Northeast of Brazil, the spatial distribution as well as the absolute number of rural poor stand out. In 2003, this basin contained 10% of all the Brazilian poor and 18% of all of the rural poor. In particular, of the approximately 17 million who inhabited the SFRB in that year, 21% were poor and of the 4 million people who lived in rural areas of the SFRB, nearly 1/3 were poor.3 As seen in Figure 1, these rural poor were not evenly distributed across the basin. The proportion of the rural poor tended to be lower in the southern portion of the SFRB and much higher in the central northern zones, with some municípios registering rural poverty rates well above 50%. These parts of the basin also contain almost all of the rural population considered indigent, i.e., those living in extreme poverty (Figure 2).
Poverty reduction efforts are underway in Brazil and in the SFRB (e.g., Programa Fome Zero, Bolsa Família, Bolsa Escola, Bolsa Alimentação, Cartão Alimentação e Auxílio Gás) and are having an effect (FAO, 2006 and Soares et al., 2006). But in areas such as the SFRB with marked intra-regional income disparities, rural poverty programs might benefit from ever more detailed information on the spatial distribution of poverty (Minot et al., 2006), especially if reliable links could be established between poverty and easily-observable variables (e.g., access to water or to markets).
To date, however,...