WDR focuses on agriculture for faster growth

The World Development Report (WDR) 2008 released by the World Bank last week stressed that agriculture could work in concert with other sectors to produce faster growth, reduce poverty and sustain the environment.

The report has been released at a time when the world is about to face a serious food crisis and after 25 years a WDR issue focused on agriculture.

The report said that the world's agriculture are vast, varied and rapidly changing with the right policies and supportive investments at local, national and global levels. Today's agriculture offers new opportunities to hundreds of millions of rural poor to move out of poverty.

Pathways out of poverty open to them by agriculture include smallholder farming and animal husbandry, employment in the new agriculture of high-value products, entrepreneurship and jobs in the emerging rural non-farm economy.

Promoting agriculture is imperative to meet the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty and hunger by 2015 and continuing to reduce poverty and hunger for several decades thereafter. Agriculture alone will not be enough to massively reduce poverty but it has proven to be uniquely powerful for that task, the report said.

The report states that in the agriculture based countries, which include most of sub - Saharan Africa, agriculture and its associate industries are essential to growth and to reduce mass poverty and food insecurity.

Using agriculture as the basis for economic growth in the agriculture based countries requires a productivity revolution in smallholder farming.

In transforming countries, which include most of South and East Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, rapidly rising rural-urban income disparities and continuing extreme rural poverty are major sources of social and political tensions.

The problem cannot be sustainably addressed through agricultural protection that raises the price of food or through subsidies.

Addressing income disparities in transforming countries requires a comprehensive approach that pursues multiple pathways out of poverty. Shifting to high value agriculture, decentralising non-farm economic activity to rural areas and providing assistance to help people move out of agriculture.

The report said that if the world is committed to reduce poverty and achieving sustainable growth, the power of agriculture for development must be unleashed. But there are no magic bullets. Using agriculture for development is a complex process, the report said.