The 2008 World Development Report and the political economy of Southeast Asian agriculture

Abstract

This article seeks to determine what light the literature on the political economy of agriculture in Southeast Asia can shed on the analysis that underpins the World Bank's 2008 World Development Report, Agriculture for Development. It argues that work on Southeast Asia highlights gaps and problems in the Bank's account relating to the dynamics of boom crops, to the nature of social and political mobilisation around agriculture, and to the conceptualisation of agrarian transition.

Keywords:

• agriculture
• development
• political economy
• Southeast Asia
• World Bank

Notes

I would like to thank Jennifer Clapp, Rodolphe de Koninck, Tania Li, Jonathan Rigg, and an anonymous reviewer for their very helpful comments.

¹The WDR does mention that parts of Southeast Asia are currently seeing rapid deforestation (p. 191).

²Figures downloaded from the FAOSTAT database, 11 November 2007. Because these figures count doublecropped land twice, and do not include land that was farmed but not harvested (due to disease, damage, etc.), they do not give a precise indication of the area of a country's agricultural land.