Agriculture

There are 900 million poor people living in rural areas in the world today. Rural poverty is as diverse as are the rural poor in their livelihood strategies. While acknowledging this diversity, certain trends can be identified. In many poorer developing countries, agriculture is the principle source of overall economic growth, and agricultural growth is the cornerstone of poverty reduction.

Agriculture is facing fundamental change. Human population growth, improved incomes and shifting dietary patterns are increasing the demand for food and other agricultural products. At the same time, however, the natural-resource base underpinning agricultural production is diminishing because of growing threats to genetic diversity and the degradation of land and water resources.

Revolutionary advances in biological and information sciences offer great potential to address these resource constraints. However, making their benefits available to small-scale farmers is a major challenge. Urban consumers, both domestic and international, are increasingly driving the transformation process by demanding diversified, high quality and safe foods. International trade is increasing rapidly in response to these demands, bringing with it a set of global governance treaties and regulatory frameworks whose implementation requires local capacity.

Agriculture employs nearly one-half of the labor force in developing countries. Indeed, a high share of rural communities and especially the rural poor are directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture through farming, food processing, fishing, forestry, and trade. At the same time, we are witnessing a paradigm shift from agriculture being an often protected and sometimes closed sector highly influenced by state interventions toward an open, diversified and highly competitive sector, tightly interlinked with other economic sectors and more strongly influenced by macro-economic policies. This shift is occurring only slowly, however.

To reach the millennium targets of cutting hunger and poverty, agricultural growth must be on top of the development agenda.