Accordingly, Silveira and Fernandes (2007) find that the number of indigent people Page | 20 decreased from 12.4% in 2001 to about 7.6% in 2005, and the number of poor people from 28.7% to 20.8%.10 Brazil has thus already met the Millennium Development Goal of reducing substantially the number of people living in poverty (World Bank, 2009a). Though poverty has been alleviated in the past few years, extreme poverty still affects a large population, particularly in the country's rural parts of the north-east (Presidency of the Republic, 2007, Silveira et al., Average rural per-capita income is substantially lower than in urban areas: BRL 312 (USD 171) against BRL 689 (USD 377.5) (IBGE, 2007b).