With the United Nations' 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development entering its final phase and progress falling short of expectations, officials and experts attending a seminar in Beijing on Wednesday urged the international community to keep poverty reduction high on the global development agenda and pay greater attention to the needs of developing countries.
Addressing the 2026 International Seminar on Global Poverty Reduction Partnerships, they also called for stronger partnerships, greater exchanges of development experience and innovative approaches to poverty reduction.
Ma Hongtao, head of the Department of International Cooperation at the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, emphasized that stronger partnerships, greater knowledge sharing and closer international coordination are imperative for accelerating global poverty reduction. "There is no universal formula for eliminating poverty," Ma said, noting that different countries have different development stages, resource endowments and governance conditions, and should therefore chart development paths suited to their own national conditions.
She highlighted the value of documenting successful poverty reduction practices, citing examples from previous case-collection initiatives, including a China-Nigeria project that helped upgrade the cassava industry and raised incomes for tens of thousands of farming households.
Robert Walker, a British sociologist and professor at Beijing Normal University, said that China's achievements in poverty reduction offer valuable lessons for the international community.
"The reason we have stopped reducing extreme poverty globally is very largely because China did it in 2021," he said.
China's approach to measuring poverty differs from the income-based methods used across much of the Sustainable Development Goals framework, Walker said.
China's progress is built on decades of experience, including policies targeting poor villages and mobilizing resources from more-developed regions to support less-developed regions, he said. "China has demonstrated what is possible," Walker added.
Sohail Khan, deputy secretary-general of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, noted that most of the world's extreme poor live in remote rural areas with harsh natural conditions. "No country can address these challenges alone," Khan said, calling for stronger connections between regional organizations and global institutions, more investment in capacity-building for women and young people, and support for community-oriented technological innovations.
He also proposed establishing agricultural production or demonstration centers to promote poverty reduction cooperation.
zhaoyimeng@chinadaily.com.cn
