The World Bank on ‘agriculture for development’: a failure of imagination or the power of ideology?

Abstract

The paper provides a critique of the World Bank's 2008 World Development Report on the role of agriculture in the development process, specifically its conception of capitalist farming as a pathway out of rural poverty. It is argued that the Report is unable to overcome a fundamental deficit in development thinking based on modernisation theory and an ideological predisposition towards (and belief in) the agency and working of the market. The paper also argues that the failure of the Report to propose radical land redistributive measures for tackling rural poverty derives from its failure to grasp the fundamental cause and dynamics of rural poverty.

Keywords:

• agrarian transformation
• pathways out of rural poverty
• World Bank
• neoliberal globalisation

Notes

¹De Janvry and Sadoulet (2000, 389) note that ‘[d]espite relatively high income levels among developing countries, Latin American countries have high incidences of rural poverty because of the highly unequal distribution of income that characterises them, both between sectors and within the rural sector’. He also notes that rural poverty is ‘considerably deeper’ than urban poverty, rooted as it is in grossly unequal land tenure systems and associated conditions of landlessness, land poverty, and near landlessness.

²For example, the WDR 2008 (p. 27) conceives of the three worlds of global agriculture within the same understanding of a long-term development process of structural transformation as the WDR 1982 (p. 43). A major centre of reference for an analysis of this process is the classic work of Chenery and Syrquin (1975), in which the structural transformation is analysed in terms of a progressive decline in the share of agriculture in GDP and in a similar decline for the shares of the labour force in agricultural employment. Thus, the WDR-08, like the WDR-82, clearly expects that, over time, agriculture-based countries (agrarian societies) will eventually be transformed (industrialised and modernised) and eventually urbanised (p. 28).

³This PWC takes a number of forms, including: (i) proposals for a ‘more inclusive neoliberalism’ based on a ‘new social policy that targets the poor’ and ‘local institutions for poverty alleviation’; (ii) ‘a decentred but capable state’ with a ‘joined-up decentralised governance’ (Craig and Porter 2006); (iii) a new development paradigm based on decentralised governance, social capital, and local development (Atria et al. 2004); (iv) a call for ‘more balance between the state and the market’ (Ocampo 2007); (v) the institution of a ‘social democratic regime’ capable of ‘reconciling … growth through globalised markets with extensions of political, social and economic rights’ (Sandbrook et al. 2007); and (vi) an overarching Comprehensive Development Framework (CDF), and, within this framework, construction of a new policy tool – the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) – introduced by the World Bank to the ‘development community’ at the 1999 G8 Summit.

⁴ECLAC's Social Panorama of Latin America provides the latest ‘official’ poverty estimates available for the countries of Latin America. These estimates indicate that in 2006–7, 36.5 percent of Latin America's population (195 million people) were poor and 13.4 percent (71 million) were extremely poor. This represents a significant improvement in the situation prevailing in the region in the 1990s. However, other studies (see Petras and Veltmeyer 2009) suggest that the real poverty rates, determined on the basis of a ‘basic needs’ measure as opposed to the World Bank's standard measure of US$2 a day, are much higher and well over 50 percent in many cases, with a 20 percent urban–rural differential.