Making Agriculture a Development Priority
– Magazine revisits recommendations from the 2008 World Development Report, Agriculture and Development, in the context of the current food crisis
– Innovations, investments and policy reforms can enable farming to relieve hunger, reduce poverty
– Todays agriculture offers new, different development opportunities
WASHINGTON, 28th October, 2008: While grain, rice, and corn prices have dropped from their peaks earlier this year, they remain at historic highs, devastating poor people around the world.
A World Bank flagship report on agriculture published last fall called for faster growth in agriculture and improved productivity in the cultivation of basic food crops as ways to improve food security worldwide.
But the “2008 World Development Report (WDR), Agriculture and Development”, came out before the global food price hike became acute.
The latest issue of Development Outreach magazine revisits the WDRs key lessons in the context of the current food crisis, and looks at what agriculture can do to solve it.
The food crisis has put agriculture and its role in development in the spotlight. The urgency of situation and search for solutions should create the momentum needed for innovative approaches to farming.
“The world of agriculture has changed dramatically over the past 30 years,” write Alain de Janvry and Derek Byerlee, guest editors for this magazine edition. De Janvry and Byerlee were co-directors of the 2008 World Development Report.
“Globalization, far-reaching technological and institutional innovations, and new roles for the state, private sector, and civil society define a new context for a changed agriculture”, they state.
Todays Agriculture Offers New, Different Development Opportunities
The magazine examines current issues in agriculture on many fronts, including biofuels, rural finance, supply chains, transgenics, and conservation tillage, as well as policies and roles for the state, the private sector and producers that could enable agriculture to help relieve the food crisis and deliver on poverty reduction.
Some of the questions include: How will governments deal with an extended period of volatile grain prices? Will countries develop new policies, instruments, and institutions to ease the plight of the poor? Or will large numbers of countries try to directly control physical grain production, marketing, and stocks?
How can women farmers benefit from planting cash crops? Can innovations reignite anemic rural finance?
Agriculture continues to be fundamental for reducing poverty, de Janvry and Byerlee write.
“It deserves much greater attention from governments and international development agencies than it has received over the last 25 years. Agriculture offers new opportunities for development, but they will be different from the past,” they write.
Kilde: Verdensbanken
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