Rural finance and economic development

Newspaper

Agricultural Growth for the Poor: an Agenda for Development

World Bank publication (2005)

The potential and the urgency for securing agriculture’s prominence in the development agenda have never been greater. A series of global challenges and opportunities, from the biophysical forces driving climate change to the complex rules governing markets and trade, are rapidly defining an entirely new set of conditions for agriculture. At the same time, the international community is confronting the escalating social and economic costs of poverty, hunger, gender inequality, environmental degradation, and other barriers to development—many of which can be addressed by agricultural growth that benefits the poor. The majority of the world’s poor depend directly or indirectly on agriculture. Many impoverished people have benefited from the substantial investments made in agricultural development in the 1970s and 1980s. These investments brought major breakthroughs to farmers’ fields, enabling countries to improve food security, increase the incomes of rural households, and use agriculture as the engine of growth for the whole economy. Over the past decade, the global population living on less than US$1 per day has fallen from 28 to 22 percent, an achievement that owes a great deal to increased incomes from agriculture. Increased food production has also reduced malnourishment for hundreds of millions of people.

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