The World Development Report 2008: inconsistencies, silences, and the myth of ‘win-win’ scenarios

Abstract

The World Development Report 2008 (WDR-2008) on agriculture and development has been received with much expectation and controversy. This paper welcomes some aspects of the WDR-2008 that help us reinvigorate some debates on agricultural development, so far marginalised in international development policy agendas. The paper, however, focuses on some critical problems in the report and the World Bank's stance on agriculture. First, there are tensions between advocacy and research and between the World Bank's rhetoric and operational realities. Secondly, the report suffers from the usual adherence to superficial win-win scenarios that mask conflict of interest and power relations. Thirdly, the WDR-2008 is caught in a tension between neo-populist pro-small farmer views and ‘modernist’ pro-agribusiness stances. Fourthly, the analysis of agricultural development in isolation from broader development processes and especially without a systematic analysis of industrialisation and agriculture–industry relations seriously limits the analytical and empirical value of the report.

Keywords:

• agriculture
• World Bank
• political economy
• smallholders
• industrialisation

Notes

I would like to thank Tania Li for her editorial support and useful comments. I also thank one anonymous reviewer for helpful suggestions.

¹See Broad (2006, 412) for a lucid discussion of the ways the World Bank's research department engages in what is called ‘paradigm maintenance’, reflected in ‘the transformation of the World Bank and its principal research unit into a key defender, maintainer, and promoter of the neoliberal paradigm’.

²Castel-Branco (2008) points out that the 1986 WDR also talked about agriculture. In fact, more than half of that WDR was devoted to issues of trade and pricing policies for agriculture and represented a clear manifestation of ‘getting prices right’ discourse, which underpinned the agricultural structural adjustment programmes widely implemented in the 1980s and 1990s in a majority of developing countries.

³It is sometimes a pity that some of the most fervent critics of the World Bank, who simply see it as an ‘imperialist’ institution, appear to be much more ‘empiro-phobic’ than the Bank itself.

⁴See World Bank-IEG (2007).

⁵In assessing the Bank's work on marketing reforms in Africa the evaluation report concludes, ‘why did results fall short of expectations? Because of inadequate background analytical work, weak political support, and insufficient appreciation of the system's incentives’ (World Bank-IEG 2007, 67).

⁶Rural labour markets and wage labour receive substantial attention in chapter 9.

⁷Of course this critical assumption ignores that small farmers may also hire workers and therefore face these problems. Moreover, whether family labour is more incentivised and productive is an assumption that requires empirical test (Johnston and Le Roux 2008).

⁸See Scott (1977) and Byres (2004).

⁹See Rizzo (2009) for a critique of this incoherence.

¹⁰The report devotes a substantial part of its analysis to this question, especially chapter 5.

¹¹See Rizzo (2009) and Bretton Woods Project (2007).

¹²See several chapters in Akram-Lodhi and Kay (2009).

¹³See also Kay (2009) for a detailed discussion of the urban bias thesis and the extent to which the WDR-2008 and its “agriculture-for-development” agenda ‘can be seen as an updated version of the “agriculture first” position upheld by those development economists who prioritise agriculture’ (Kay 2009, 128).

¹⁴See, for example, an account of the impressive development of the refined palm oil processing industry in Malaysia (Jomo and Rock 1998).