Agricultural Development and Policy Coherence
The first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) - to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger - has two specific targets. It calls for reducing the proportion of people living on less than USD 1 a day to half the 1990 level by 2015. It also calls for halving the proportion of people who suffer from hunger between 1990 and 2015.
Unfortunately, latest estimates of the numbers of undernourished people show that progress in reducing hunger has been mixed. Worldwide, FAO estimates that 1.02 billion people continue to suffer from chronic hunger.
Despite the importance of agricultural development...
Throughout the developing world, agriculture accounts for around 11% of GDP but more than half of total employment. However, its relative importance is much greater in those countries where hunger is most widespread. In those countries where over one-third of the population are undernourished, agriculture accounts for 30% of their national output, and nearly 70% of the people rely on agriculture for their livelihoods.
The majority of the world's poor - three quarters of the total - live in rural areas. In t he world's least developed countries, 82% of rural households are poor. Urbanisation is reducing the relative importance of the rural poor, but the World Bank estimates that their share in the global number of poor will not fall below 50% until 2035. Agriculture and rural development thus has a key role in helping to lift the poor out of poverty and to contribute to the eradication of hunger.
...agricultural performance is often disappointing
However, growth in agricultural production in many developing countries has been disappointing. The overall agricultural trade surplus of developing countries has virtually disappeared and the outlook to 2030 suggests that they will, as a group, become net importers of agricultural commodities, and especially of temperate-zone commodities. The least developed countries (LDCs), also as a group, became net importers of agricultural products as early as the mid-1980s.
One reason why some developing countries have become net importers of food reflects the operation of global comparative advantage. Some land-scarce but labour-surplus or natural-resource-rich economies concentrate on producing and exporting manufactured goods or natural resources in return for agricultural imports (Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia). Another reason is because of poorly-designed policy interventions in developing countries in the past. Too often developing countries effectively taxed their agricultural sectors, and it is only recently that this bias against agriculture in development strategies is gradually being overcome.
Is EU agricultural policy inconsistent with development policy objectives?
But another major factor is the way agricultural policy in the developed countries has worked against the growth of agricultural exports from the developing world and introduced unfair competition in their domestic markets. Much of this website discusses the extent to which EU agricultural and agricultural trade policies are coherent with, and supportive of, the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, and particularly the elimination of extreme poverty and hunger, in developing countries.
Links
The NEPAD Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Programme website
CAADP is the Africa owned and Africa led initiative working to boost agricultural productivity in Africa..
The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa website
AGRA is a partnership between The Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to promote smallholder agriculture in Africa.
Resources:
FAO, The State of Food and Agriculture, annual, Rome
This annual flagship report from the FAO provides a comprehensive annual report on world food and agricultural trends, as well as addressing a particular policy theme in each issue.
FAO, The State of Food Insecurity in the World, annual, Rome
The annual report raises awareness about global hunger issues, discusses underlying causes of hunger and malnutrition and monitors progress towards hunger reduction targets established at the 1996 World Food Summit and the Millennium Summit.
UN Millennium Project, Halving Hunger: It Can Be Done, New York, 2005.
This major report sets out a strategy to reach the first Millennium Development Goal target of halving hunger.
World Bank, Agriculture for Development, World Development Report 2008, Washington.
In this report, the Bank sets out its ideas on how to accelerate agricultural production in developing countries and the role of public policies in assisting this.