At April 22 and 25, scholar community, officials and producers of Bolivia will take notice of the World Development Report called this year "Agriculture for Development".

World Development Report 2008 calls for greater investment in agriculture in developing countries.The report warns that the sector must be placed at the center of the development agenda if the goals of halving extreme poverty and hunger by 2015 are to be realized.

• While 75 percent of the world’s poor live in rural areas in developing countries, a mere 4 percent of official development assistance goes to agriculture.
  
• In Sub-Saharan Africa, a region heavily reliant on agriculture for overall growth, public spending for farming is also only 4 percent of total government spending and the sector is still taxed at relatively high levels.
  
• For the poorest people, GDP growth originating in agriculture is about four times more effective in raising incomes of extremely poor people than GDP growth originating outside the sector

Willem G. Janssen will visit Bolivia to explain the content of the Report.  

Janssen is the Lead Agricultural Specialist in the Latin America and the Caribbean Agriculture and Rural Development Unit of the World Bank. From 2004 to 2007 he worked in the South Asia division of the World Bank, where he was responsible for the National Agricultural Innovation Project in India, was leading the development of an Agricultural Technology Management Strategy for Sri Lanka and was engaged with several other Bank projects to improve agriculture in the South Asia region. He is one of the leaders of the Bank’s work to explore the use of Innovation Systems approaches in agriculture. From 2000 to 2004 he was Program Director of the International Service for National Agricultural Research (ISNAR), one of the centers of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. From 1993 to 2000 he was a senior scientist at ISNAR, working on the development of research management tools and institutional change processes for the agricultural sector.  From 1982 to 1993 he was a senior researcher at CIAT, an International Agricultural Research Center in Colombia, working on the economics of technological change. He holds MSc and PhD degrees from Wageningen Agricultural University, the Netherlands, where he majored in agricultural economics with minors in business administration and development economics. He has published several books and numerous articles on agricultural development, on research policy and management, and on institutional change. He has worked in more than 30 developing countries, of which more than 15 are in Latin America.   

Schedule

April 22: Europa Hotel, 9:00 to 12:30 am.

April, 25: Los Tajibos Hotel, 9:00 to 12:30 am.