Poverty Alleviation Strategies for Developing Countries through Agriculture

Poverty Alleviation Strategies for Developing Countries through Agriculture!

Accelerated public investments are needed to facilitate agricultural and rural growth through:

1. Yield-increasing crop varieties, including those that are drought and salt tolerant and pest resistant, and improved livestock.

2. Yield-increasing and environmentally friendly production technology.

3. Reliable, timely, and reasonably priced access to appropriate inputs such as tools, fertiliser, and, when needed, pesticides, as well as the credit often needed to purchase them.

4. Strong extension services and technical assistance to communicate timely information and developments in technology and sustainable resource management to farmers and to relay farmer concerns to researchers.

5. Improved rural infrastructure and effective markets.

6. Particular attention to the needs of women farmers, who grow much of the locally produced food in many developing countries.

7. Primary education and health care, clean water, safe sanitation, and good nutrition for all.

These investments need to be supported by good governance and an enabling policy environment, including trade, macroeconomic, and sectoral policies that do not discriminate against agriculture, and policies that provide appropriate incentives for the sustainable management of natural resources, such as secure property rights for small farmers.

Development efforts must engage poor farmers and other low-income people as active participants, not passive recipients; unless the affected people have a sense of ownership, development schemes have little likelihood of success.

Developing countries must reverse present declining levels of public investment in agriculture. On average, they devote 7.5 percent of government spending to agriculture (and just 7 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa). For their part, donor countries must redress the precipitous decline in aid to agriculture and rural development, which plunged by nearly 50 percent in real terms between 1986 and 1996.

Overall development aid has also fallen in recent years. Donors must also rethink their rather inflexible emphasis of the past two decades on less government and a smaller public sector, which has contributed to public disinvestment in agriculture in the developing countries.

Investment in Agricultural Research:

Public investment in agricultural research is of particular importance for achieving food security in developing countries. The private sector is unlikely to undertake much of the research needed by small farmers because it cannot expect sufficient returns to cover costs. IFPRI research has shown that the annual rates of return to agricultural research and development are, on average, 73 percent.

Benefits to society from agricultural research can be extremely large but will not be obtained without public investments. Low-income developing countries grossly underinvest in agricultural research: less than 0.5 percent of the value of their agricultural production, compared to 2 percent in higher-income countries.

Sub-Saharan Africa, which desperately needs productivity increases in agriculture, has only 42 agricultural researchers per mullion economically active persons in agriculture, compared with 2,458 in industrial countries.

Efforts to improve longer-term productivity on small- scale farms, with an emphasis on staple food crops, must be accelerated. Research and policies are also needed to help farmers, communities, and governments better cope with risks resulting from such factors as poor market integration, poorly functioning markets, and climatic fluctuations.

More research must be directed to the development of appropriate technology for sustainable intensification of agriculture in resource-poor areas, where a high percentage of poor people live, and where environmental risks are severe. The needed research must join all appropriate scientific tools together, with better use of the insights of traditional indigenous knowledge.

Research and technology alone will not drive agricultural growth. The full and beneficial effects of agricultural research and technological change will materialise only if government policies are conducive to and supportive of poverty alleviation and sustainable management of natural resources.

Agricultural Biotechnology and Food Security:

Although conventional applications of biotechnology, such as tissue culture and fermentation amongst others, is under way in several developing countries, little genetically improved (transgenic) seed material has been grown in the poorer developing countries to date so ex post assessment is virtually impossible. A great deal is known, however, about the social and economic risks and benefits associated with traditional Mendelian plant breeding as exemplified by the Green Revolution.

The analysis, therefore, begins with the identification of similarities and differences between the Green Revolution and modern biotechnology, and an attempt is made to draw lessons from the Green Revolution and to look at the difference between that technology package and modern biotechnology to try to assess the likely social and economic risks and benefits of modern agricultural biotechnology ex ante.