The World Bank, Agricultural Credit, and the Rise of Neoliberalism in Global Development

ABSTRACT

This article examines the development of the World Bank’s agricultural credit programming between 1960 and 1990. I show how these projects constituted key sites where neoliberal development governance was initially articulated, negotiated, and contested. Agricultural credit was a key point of emphasis for the Bank during its ‘Assault on Poverty’ era in the 1970s. Agricultural programming in this era reflected a strong emphasis on agricultural development through marketisation and commercialisation, yet also very clearly demonstrated clear points of ambivalence around the role of credit in relation to agricultural markets. Agricultural credit projects increasingly included implicit or explicit conditionalities linked to the marketisation of interest rates, the commercialisation of state-owned agricultural lenders, and the marketisation of wider financial sectors into the 1980s. But these efforts to marketize and commercialise agricultural credit through these projects often reflected mundane operational challenges as much as ideological shifts, and themselves largely failed even on their own terms. Looking at the evolution of agricultural credit projects thus shows how broadly neoliberal positions were arrived at in part through trial and error adjustments to operational concerns, as well as how fraught the promotion of market-based financial systems was in practice even in the structural adjustment era.

KEYWORDS:

• World Bank
• agriculture
• finance
• neoliberalism
• marketisation
• development

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the anonymous reviewers at New Political Economy for their very helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A frequent target of early neoliberals’ critical attention, see Bair (2009).

2 As the Bank established its Independent Evaluation Group in 1973, the results of most projects launched before about 1970 were not formally evaluated ex post.

3 The vast majority of these projects were national in scope, but in some instances there were projects targeted to particular provinces (notably, in ten Indian provinces between 1970 and 1973) and in some instances different projects targeting different classes of borrowers (e.g. livestock and small farmers, respectively) were run simultaneously.

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Notes on contributors

Nick Bernards

Nick Bernards is Assistant Professor of Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick. He is author of The Global Governance of Precarity: Primitive Accumulation and the Politics of Irregular Work (Routledge, 2018), and A Critical History of Poverty Finance: Colonial Roots and Neoliberal Failures (Pluto Press, forthcoming).