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culture
the
Answer?
By Marc J. Cohen
After decades of neglect, agriculture
is back in a high place on the
international development agenda.
There is now a broad consensus
among development actors that
agriculture plays an essential role in
economic growth, poverty reduction,
conflict resolution and tackling climate change.
Nevertheless, controversy swirls around the question
of how best to achieve agricultural development,
with sharp debates over such issues as land tenure
and optimal farm size, as well as what to cultivate
and where and how to do so.
Year of
Agriculture
atSAIS
Agriculture has “special powers”
for poverty reduction, the World Bank
noted in its World Development Report
2008: Agriculture for Development.
According to the World Bank, studies
show that economic growth based on
agriculture is at least twice as effective
as other kinds of growth in cutting
poverty.
Agricultural economist John Mellor
explained the reasons for this in a series
of works written between the 1960s
and the 1990s. In poor developing
countries, where agriculture accounts
for a large share of economic activity,
technological change in staple crop
production leads to substantial productivity
gains. This in turn creates more
employment opportunities on the farm,
lower food prices for consumers in
both rural and urban areas, and gains in
farm income (despite lower prices) due
to lower unit costs of production. Rural
people use their higher incomes to
purchase nonfarm goods and services,
thereby stimulating growth throughout
the economy. And finally, continued
productivity gains in agriculture generate
the basis for industrial development
(one Mellor-edited study is titled Agriculture
on the Road to Industrialization).
Mellor’s theory—often referred to as
“agricultural growth linkages”—drew
heavily on evidence from South Asia’s
“green revolution.”
Contemporary development thinking
focuses on poverty reduction as
much as economic growth, as reflected
in the U.N.’s Millennium Development
Goals. According to the U.N. International
Fund for Agricultural Development,
at least 70 percent of the world’s
extremely poor people—those living
on the equivalent of less than $1.25
a day—reside in the rural areas of
developing countries. In Sub-Saharan
Africa and South and Southeast Asia,
the figure is 75 percent or more. Poor
rural dwellers rely on agriculture and
related activities for their livelihoods,
either as members of farming or herding
households or as agricultural,
forestry and fishery workers. Ironically,
according to the U.N. Millennium
Project’s Task Force on Hunger, fully
half of all hungry people live in small-
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