 My name is Jakob Skruitt. I work for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, also called FAO. To those of you who may know, it's the specialized agency of the United Nations that deals with agriculture, fishery, forestry, agricultural rural development, food and nutrition security and issues like that. FAO has not traditionally worked specifically on migration issues, but FAO has also begun to think about implications of the growing international migration, what are the implications of migration for FAO's work and how we better integrate migration concerning to what we are doing. One of the elements of this approach is the preparation of a FAO major flagship report on migration. What I'm referring to is the State of Food and Agriculture. It's the annual FAO report that has been published on an annual basis since 1947. Each of the reports has a thematic focus, and this is sort of meant to be a policy document that is directed to member governments, FAO meetings, media, national sites. So we are directed to what policy makers. So we want a short focus, everything is based on the policy relevant like making contribution to the policy debates on migration within the areas that are relevant for FAO's specific mandate. So the 2018 edition of this will be on migration. The sort of provisional title we have is Rural Migration, Agriculture and Rural Development. We are in the process of preparing the document. We are sort of initial stages. What I would like to share with you are the ideas, what we are planning to do with the document, what are some of the challenges we are facing, and what are some preliminary data on rural migration we are coming up with. We would rather much appreciate feedback from you as well that can help us make a report that is more relevant and useful. So first of all, now why are we doing a document like this? FAO has not really dealt with migration issues. First of all, of course, we have there's a major international tension to migration that is reflected in the SDGs, SDG10. It was called for facilitating orderly, safe, regular and responsive migration. It's also, we have the New York Declaration from 2016 that called for the development of a couple of two global compacts on migrants and refugees. So FAO has tried to business itself within this and make a contribution to the debate within this context. We also find there is a lot of international attention to migration, but particularly to international migration. But reality we find that migration is a much, much larger issue. It's the internal migration dimension is extremely important, and the rural dimension of that is particularly significant as well. The rural migration too and from rural areas. We want to bring more attention to this area as well. Thirdly, we feel that migration is often perceived, at least in some of the high income countries, as a problem that needs to be addressed. Whereas we want to make very clear that in reality mobility of people is part of the economic development process, particularly of rural and structural transformation and agricultural transformation. So it's a much, much more complicated phenomenon. Fourthly, we think that migration is relevant for FAO's mandate. There is a close linkage, we believe, between agriculture and rural development on the one hand and migration on the other hand. I mean agriculture and rural development determine conditions in rural areas which then affect people's migration decisions. So we feel that agriculture and rural development have a set of roles to play in determining migration flows. At the same time, migration can have an impact in agricultural areas on agriculture, sex and rural development. Different impacts like labour market impact, the short run, impacts on livelihoods of households, through remittances, et cetera. So there is this bi-directional relationship that we think is important. The evidence on this is not that clear and systematic. So we would try to sort of bring together the evidence that exists to get a clearer picture about what is the relationship between migration on the one hand and agriculture and rural development on the other. So what is the focus of the report that FAO is we're trying to prepare? Oh, first of all, we have to stay within, we're on all the ideas with agriculture, rural development. So we have to stay and have a focus on rural areas. So what we will look at is migration flows that take place through rural areas, from rural areas and between rural areas. So we will look at both international migration flows and internal migration flows. We want to look at what are the drivers, the fact that may determine migration decisions, the drivers that are active in the rural areas specifically and particularly in areas that have some relevance to agricultural and rural development. We want to look at what are the constraints that might exist in migration as well in rural areas because often migration is constrained by factors. So when migration might even be a desirable outcome sometimes it's not possible for individual families to undertake migration because the constraints they're facing like financial constraints, gender constraints and other types of constraints. We want to look at the impacts of migration in rural areas in terms of labor market impacts, impacts on livelihoods, impacts through remittances and impacts of their relationship with diaspora and migrant communities, et cetera. So this gives you a sort of graphic illustration of what we're trying to focus on. So we have these migration flows that, you know, we have the rural areas on the left, we have cities and other countries. So migration flows happen between these various locations, between rural areas, from rural areas to cities, from rural areas to other countries, et cetera. So the areas as well as between cities and et cetera. So the areas we want to focus on are the arrows that are in blue. We want to focus on the drivers and the impacts that take place occur in the rural areas themselves. So that's indeed what the focus of the report that we're trying to put together. So what are some of the key challenges we are facing in doing this? First of all, it's very difficult to really assess the patterns and trends and characteristics of rural migration. What we call rural, by rural migration we understand migration through rural areas, from rural areas to between rural areas. There are some conceptual problems. One is how do you define rural versus urban? There are some differences between how the countries define these very differently. There may be reclassification of rural versus urban areas. So international comparison is complicated. Furthermore, the distinction between rural and urban areas is not necessarily as clear-cut and in the past we have a sort of rural-urban spectrum that makes this type of analysis more difficult to handle. We have some serious data challenges for rural migration. There is not that much information available. There is lots of international migration, but for this specific area we are really at a bit, we have some difficulty coming up with systematic evidence. We have another key challenge, it's the complexity of the migration patterns that we see where there are many sites of migration. We have permanent migration, we have temporary migration, seasonal migration is a very important phenomenon for rural areas. We would like to address all of them and that makes it also difficult. We have the complexity of migration decisions which can be made at individual, the collective at individual level or collective decisions at household or even community level. There are many complex reasons for migrating as well. It can be economic, non-economic. We have distinctly forced migration which is what we see often in terms of protracted crisis which we are also looking at and what we call some voluntary migration. Even though this distinction is not necessarily clear-cut either because migration decisions are normally constrained so we have the sort of rather continuum between forced and voluntary migration and a clear-cut distinction. So what are we planning to do with report the objective? We are trying to... It's important that we consider migration as parts of the process of economic and social development. It's not something that we have to stop or migration is bad so we want to be very clear but we're not considering either slowing or promoting migration to a rural area as an objective insane. There may be situations of protracted crisis where clearly migration is not a desirable phenomenon because it's associated with very unpleasant and violent situations. However, what we really want to do is help to understand the linkage that exists between migration and rural agricultural development and linkages in both directions. So we hope to be able to contribute to improve policy-making in the area and not policy-making in specific migration policies. Policy areas that relate to agricultural and rural development have an implication or somehow a relation with migration. So this is just a broad outline of the report the way we expect it to look. We'll have an introduction. We'll look at trends in rural migration. We'll look at what drives rural migration and the impacts on rural communities and agricultural development. We have a special focus on protracted crisis and rural migration. We want to try to derive some policy implications in the final chapter. So I would like to go in to talk about one of the key challenges we're facing which is documenting what has actually happened in terms of rural migration. Now we have a situation where international migration is pretty well documented. So we sort of start from there. This is UN data. It shows the stock of international migrants in the world in 2015. So at the last year, the first year is 1999, so we have seen a growing number of international migrants in both developed and developing regions. We can see the majority are in developed regions, but there are a lot of developing regions as well. So it's probably 60 to 40 breakdowns. What we do not know is how many of these come from rural areas, how many come from urban areas, how many may have done a phase migration from rural to urban and then subsequently to other countries. So we have an issue here. We're breaking this down. We can see that although the number of migrants has increased the share in the total population, it has not increased dramatically. That's the blue line. That's for the world. We can see it's barely moved from a bit below to a bit more than 3%. However, in developed regions, the red line, the share of migrants, the total population has increased significantly but not really as dramatically as many people probably think. I think I will skip this one to move ahead. Now, considering international migration, a lot of people probably have the perception that migration that doesn't happen from developed countries or developing country regions. In reality, the picture is much, much more nuanced than that. We tried to break down the U.N. migrant stock data by different types of migratory movements. We are from developed to developed. That represents 24% of the total. Developed to developing, that's 15 million people, 6% developing from developing countries. To develop countries, 80 million or 33%, but the largest portion of migrants have moved from a developing country to another developing country. That's something like 37%. So it's very important to bear in mind that migration is much more complex from this intra-developing country region. Migration is a very important phenomenon that we need to keep in mind. Let me give this one for reasons of time. Now, that's international migration. Internal migration is a much, much more complex issue. There is no systematic evidence the way that we have seen it but there are some conceptual issues. Like how do you define migration? Migration is sensitive to the definition or let's say the basic geographic administrative unit that you use to determine whether people are migratory or not. So the whole series of issues that make comparability problematic. However, in 2013, Charles Edwards came up with an estimate of migrant stocks at the global level. So they found that in 2005, some 229 million people were living within a different district. I think this is the highest administrative district we're talking about. In a different district within their own country, relative to five years earlier, that's 3.7% of the population. If we look at the lifetime migration, some 762 million people were living in a different location within the same country relative to the place where they were born. That's 11.7% of the population. That is four times as much as the international migrants stock that we saw before. So making sure that internal migration is a much more important significant phenomenon than international migration in terms of the quantities at least. We have also looked at household surveys to get an idea about the relative importance of international and national migration. So this is representative household surveys from a set of countries. The dates are preliminary, but you can get an idea. We have the red line that shows the share of households that have at least one international migrant. The blue line is the share of households that have at least one internal migrant. So in most cases, the internal migration seems to be most significant international migration. So what we really want to talk about though is rural migration. What happens in terms of migration to and from rural areas? And that is even more complicated to get information about than it is for the internal migration. So again, we have been trying to look here. There are different sources where you get information specifically. We can look at some household surveys to give an idea about these migration patterns. We have broken down the households here by urban households and rural households. You have looked at the share of urban households that have international and national migrant perspective. The same thing for the rural households. And so the problem here is there is no really clear pattern coming out. In some countries, international migration is more significant than national. In some cases, migration is more significant than rural areas than urban areas. So it's very difficult to come up with a clear picture from this. But this is preliminary work. We hope you'll be able to come up with some better and more precise estimates as we go along. There are different examples of countries that do have information about migration patterns. For instance, India, which have done national sample surveys at a regular rate. So let's look at the columns on the far right that shows data from 2008. We have broken down, migration has broken down into rural-urban, urban-rural and urban-urban. We can see that at the bottom we have the rural-rural. Something like 60% of the migration in India was rural-to-rural migration and 19.5% was rural-to-urban. However, there was a clear distinction between males and females. For males, we see that 27% is rural-to-rural. The rural-to-urban is higher than 9%. Whereas for women, it's a different background. Probably to do with motifs for migration, which in India, often for women, it's related to marriage, whereas for men, it's more like employment related. So that probably explains the difference. This is just a good idea with some of the challenges we face in finding out what is actually happening in terms of migration to rural areas. We also want to look at a set of other issues. I'd only mentioned them relatively briefly. We want to look at, first of all, it's important to consider migration patterns as part of an overall process of structural and rural transformation as the agricultural productivity increases. We may see some migratory patterns. This has been typically a part of the historical part of the economic and social-developed agricultural transformation. Basically, what this graphic shows is that the correlation between the X-axis, that the share of the workforce in agriculture, the Y-axis is the GDP per capita. So as GDP per capita increases, the share of the workforce in agriculture goes down. This is likely to have some impacts on migration. This graphic shows the evolution of urbanization. Basically, it is the share of the rural population in the total population which has been declining and is expected to decline over the future. Now, it's the exact relationship between the structure in agriculture and this is difficult to distinguish. We have an interesting paper discussing this in just a few minutes, so I won't go into more detail on this. Some of the other issues we also want to look at are, we want to look at what are the characteristics of the migrants at the migrant households? Who are the people who migrate and also why do they migrate? We are looking for data also on what is the characteristics of migration, what is permanent, temporary, and seasonal. Seasonal migration is a particular tricky area because there is very little information and very little analysis, but we would like to cover this dimension as well. We want to look at migration in protected crisis, both where we talk about human-induced natural hazards. This includes also slow-onset events like impacts, gradual climate change. So, I have two minutes, but I may need only one, so we'll see. I would like to conclude with just some observations. We would really like to have some feedback from you. What do you think about the approach that I was taking? Do you have any suggestions for how to go about, improve with analysis and how we can do better? We can find some of the information we're looking for. But some of the observations just a week, we see that relative international migration is fairly well documented. We do not know how much of this is rural and how much is urban migration. However, internal migration is much less well documented and data is more problematic. The comparability across countries is more problematic because migration is sensitive to the distance of migratory movements and the administrative and geographic unistat on which migrating, as estimates that migration are based. It's not clear which of two is really more important for rural areas. Further issue is we, data on the specific patterns of international migration is really scarce and problematic. We don't know that much at the global level about rural, urban, rural, rural, location, et cetera. We know very little about seasonal migration. So this is some of the big challenges we are facing in, finally, the issue is migration and protracted crisis. That sort of sense definition of what you understand by protracted crisis do we include slow onset events that we would really like to cover both. So these are some of the key questions we would like to sort of, that we are struggling with and I would really like a piece of that feedback and reaction from the audience on some of these issues. So thank you for your attention.