Agricultural growth remains central to poverty reduction, as one billion people worldwide continue living in extreme poverty, many of them in rural areas, a World Bank Group on agriculture, the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG), said in a report released on Tuesday.
Drawing on the World Bank Group's (WBG) experience in supporting agricultural growth in the past decade, the report — Growth and Productivity in Agriculture and Agribusiness: Evaluative Lessons from World Bank Group Experience — points to areas where increased funding can translate into higher impact.
In addition, the challenges posed by the global food crisis are likely to grow due to the expected doubling of worldwide food demand by 2050, the report says.
The Group's evaluation shows that agricultural projects have performed above the WBG average in Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe and Central Asia, and East Asia. Productivity growth has been particularly strong over a sustained period in China and India.
Results in Sub-Saharan Africa, however, have been weak. Lessons from the work done in important areas such as water use and irrigation, rural infrastructure, know-how on supply-value chains, and gender mainstreaming have proven to be vital to agricultural growth.
Better outcomes
Some of the country cases indicate how the expansion of rural infrastructure in China, India, and Mali yielded better outcomes in agriculture. However, in most cases, sustainability of these programmes beyond the life of the project remains an issue due to insufficient government funding and limited cost-recovery.
Tracing the history of agricultural growth and support for the sector, the report said that, in the 1990s, waning donor and government interest led to a decline in agriculture support by the WBG.
This was reversed in the mid-2000s with the food crisis and the increasing recognition of the importance of farm productivity to growth and poverty reduction.
From fiscal years 1998 to 2008, the WBG provided $23.7 billion in financing for agriculture and agribusiness activities in 108 countries, 28 of which were in Sub-Saharan Africa. An additional $5.4 billion was committed by the WBG in 2009, as support to the sector was scaled up.
World Bank and International Finance Corporation also provided non-lending services to their clients, and the Bank supported several global and regional programmes in the sector.
“The World Bank Group and partners have a unique opportunity to match the increases in the financing for agriculture with a sharper focus on improving agricultural growth and productivity,” said Vinod Thomas, Director-General, Evaluation, WBG. “The study highlights the complementary roles of the World Bank and the IFC, reflecting the importance of both the public and private sectors for agriculture.”
According to Nalini Kumar and Miguel Rebolledo Dellepiane, the co-authors of the report, “A key challenge for the WBG going forward is to increase the effectiveness of its support in agriculture-based economies, notably in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the needs are greatest. The report recognises that many of the issues that were identified as impediments to agricultural growth in the region are fundamental components of WBG's current Agriculture Action Plan FY 2010-2012.”
Evaluative lessons suggest that success in Sub-Saharan Africa will require enhanced staff skills and stronger coordination, both across sectors, including agriculture, financial sector, infrastructure, economic policy and governance, and between the World Bank and the IFC.
In one example of collaboration across WBG, support is being provided to develop Liberia's tree crop industry by which the IFC's advisory services and investments add to the Bank's support to the government's policy capacity.
The IEG report also indicates that rain-fed agriculture and the financial sustainability of projects will need more attention. Continued analytic work and policy dialogue are important to help build client capacity and understanding, and efforts are needed to ensure that WBG support is integrated with support at the country level.
Keywords: agricultural growth, poverty reduction, IEG report, World Bank Group
allied agriculture,dairying, piggaries,and associated activity,horticulture ,can erradicate the proverty,kindly look in this aspect
There is one aspect of Agricultural operations that is receiving much less attention in High Level studies,including Research. It is the possibility of reviving traditional Rain Harvesting and water Conservation measures as an insurance against the vagaries of Seasonal Rain Fall. The experiments with massive centralized Dams have not provided the intended results except where the Dams were built on thinly populated Desert Lands. The Social costs of massive dislocation of rural populations has been very high. The cost-over-runs created by resistance movements and the un-viable compromises worked out as after-thoughts should open the eyes of planners and Administrators to seriously consider the Watershed Development and Water Conservation wisdom of the past ages for support by the state and Local Governments.
I find the report commendable in its thrust. However, one area of research that international organisations do not appear to include in their support initives for Sub-Saharan Africa, appears to be the negative impact of settlement structure on rural production. Settlement structure across Sub-Saharan Africa displays often a resilient adaptation to the vagaries of climate, land access, planning interventions and state policy. Simultaneously, however, this structure imposes constraints to the mobilization of resources, infrastructure and market thereby lowering the potential for increased productivity at household level.
Agricultural productivity, production and profitability in sub-Saharan region and eastern and central regions in India can substantially improved if there is serious concern, commitment, good governance, transparency and accountability of national governments on one hand and progressively reduction in government's subsidies and international donation but adequate investment in creating physical and institutional infrastructure appropriately accompanied by government's efforts to create enabling environment and public-private-partnership in this effort. Besides, more attention needs to be devoted to knowledge management programs as initiated by ADB.
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