 The World Bank’s strategy for agricultural and rural development in ECA includes four elements: (a) ensuring the legal basis for a modern and progressive rural sector, (b) creating the institutional basis for such a sector, (c) rehabilitating or building the physical basis required, and finally, (d) enhancing the competitiveness of the sector. These four elements may be pursued on their own or together. A general lesson has been that without physical investments (to improve access to irrigation, rural infrastructure or land registries), legal and policy changes on their own are of little help to farmers.
 The Bank does not pursue legal change or innovation for its own sake. Rather, the Bank will incorporate legal reform as a critical part of its program when it becomes clear that a land code, or water code, or cooperatives law is preventing progress in any relevant field, and that in order to form viable water user associations, for example, a specific law is required to define such an institution. Such legal changes can be sought as the focal points of development policy or hybrid (policy plus investment, as with the Turkey Agricultural Reform Implementation Project) operations, as elements of more traditional investment projects, or simply as recommendations emerging from studies.
In the formerly communist world, the institutions of a market economy (that is, cooperatives, credit unions, commodity markets, warehouse receipt systems) are lacking, more so in rural areas than in capital cities. Sometimes the creation and establishment of such institutions are even more important goals of Bank investment projects than are the investments themselves.
  In many communist countries, large networks of public infrastructure were built, sometimes rivaling those of developed Western countries. While some were actually overbuilt, others were justified when built and are needed today, particularly in bulk water (irrigation, drainage, flood control, regional water supply) and roads. Yet given the fiscal collapse of transition, many of our clients have not afforded even proper maintenance of such networks, much less new investment or renewal. Thus much of the investment work underwritten by ECSSD projects, is a form of triage, keeping alive the most valuable and critical portions of such systems within the small constraints of our lending allocations. Without such investments, the physical basis of agriculture will be lost in a few years in many of our countries.
 Finally, a viable agricultural and rural sector must sell its goods and services in competition with imports domestically and in export markets as well, especially in countries too small to provide a large market. For those inside the European Union, or on the accession list, the target of such a marketing drive is obviously the EU itself. To access the EU market, or other developed markets such as North America or Japan, much help can be provided by the World Bank in terms of investments to meet standards, development of criteria for selecting produce, and improvements in processing both in terms of quality and of safety. If the Bank cannot enhance the competitiveness of the agricultural sectors it deals with, they will largely revert in function to basic subsistence.
|
RSS