WASHINGTON, Oct 19: The World Bank warned on Friday that the UN goal of halving the incidence of poverty and hunger in the poorest countries would go unmet unless agriculture took centre stage in development aid.
“Poverty is overwhelmingly rural and will be for decades to come,” World Bank chief economist Francois Bourguignon said at the presentation of the Bank’s annual World Development Report.
He said the UN Millennium Development Goal of halving the percentage of people living on less than a dollar a day by 2015 “will only be met in poor countries if much greater attention is paid to agriculture as an instrument for development.”
While 75 per cent of the world’s poor live in rural areas “a mere 4.0 per cent of official development assistance goes to agriculture in developing countries,” the report found.In sub-Saharan Africa furthermore public spending on farming amounts to only 4.0 per cent of total government expenditure.
The report said that for the poorest people an improvement in a country’s gross domestic product that is agriculture-driven is four times more effective in reducing poverty than is GDP growth originating in other sectors.
“It will be an illusion that the poor will simply be absorbed by growth taking place outside agriculture,” Bourguignon said, citing the persistence of rural poverty in the flourishing economies of China and India.
The World Bank specifically called for efforts to boost the productivity of farms devoted to staple foods and to connect small landholders to such high-value activities as poultry and dairy operations as well as aquaculture.
“At the global level,” said World Bank President Robert Zoellick “countries must deliver on vital reforms such as cutting distorting subsidies and opening markets.” Those two objectives are at the heart of the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations that were launched six years ago and which have foundered ever since.
Developing countries have been pressing governments in the industrialised world to reduce agricultural subsidies.—AFP