Role Of Agriculture In Economic Development

Role Of Agriculture In Economic Development – We who preach the gospel of agriculture with evangelical zeal find the text compelling and compelling. We are regularly possessed by the spirit to just look around and see our colleagues, in other sectors, in the country’s leadership, or even in our senior management, we doubt, yawn, or gently head for the door. We face the implicit question: “If agriculture can achieve such great things, why haven’t they happened yet?”

The last decade was one of agrarian pessimism. The promises of agricultural development did not come true. This pessimism seemed to coincide with pessimism about sub-Saharan Africa. Especially for sub-Saharan Africa, the hope was that economic development would be brought about by agricultural development. After the success of the Asian Green Revolution, the hope was that a similar agricultural miracle would transform African economies. But this hope never materialized, agricultural productivity did not increase much in SSA (Figure 1), and worse, the negative effects of the Green Revolution in Asia became increasingly evident, such as the overuse of pesticides and subsequent pollution. . Crop growth also decreased in Asia.

Role Of Agriculture In Economic Development

. For example, liberalization and greater openness to trade in the 1990s led to a decline in the economic potential of the rural sector: cheap imported Chinese plastic buckets compete with locally produced ceramics. On the other hand, it means cheaper (imported) supplies. As a result of rapid global technical change and increasingly integrated markets, prices are falling faster than yields. So rural incomes fall when they are net producers, despite productivity growth

The Role Of Agriculture In Economic Development And Poverty Reduction

. The integration of the countryside and the city means that healthy young people move out of agriculture and into the city, leaving the elderly, sick and dependents behind. Often men also move to urban areas, leaving the economy to women. This has resulted in a more sophisticated agricultural markets (and value chains) that exclude traditional smallholders who are ill-equipped to meet the strict product specifications and punctuality of delivery times demanded by expanding supermarkets. The natural resource base on which agriculture depends is poor and deteriorating. Productivity growth is therefore increasingly difficult to achieve. Finally, multiplier effects occur when a change in spending causes a disproportionately large change in aggregate demand. Thus, an increase in spending results in a greater increase in national income and consumption than the amount originally spent. But as GDP rises and the share of agriculture typically declines, the question is how important these multipliers are, especially when rural areas still have significant levels of poverty, which is common in middle-income countries.

Disillusionment with agriculture has led many donor organizations to turn away from agriculture and look instead to areas that would increase the welfare of poor people, such as health and education. Organizations that remained involved in agriculture, such as the CGIAR, were pressured to focus on reducing poverty in addition to increasing agricultural productivity. However, since the beginning of the new century, there seems to be a renewed interest in agriculture. Overview of key policy documents

, including the highly publicized Sachs report and the Kofi Annan report, show that agriculture is back on the agenda. However, the most influential report was the World Bank’s 2008 World Development Report

. This report argues that the growth of the agricultural sector contributes proportionately more to poverty reduction than the growth of any other economic sector, and therefore the focus should be on the agricultural sector alone in achieving MDG 1.

Econ Tuhan Session 6

It seems necessary to reassess the role of agriculture in development. This policy document addresses several timely but complex issues:

First, how can or does agriculture contribute to economic development, and in particular how is it related to poverty?

Second, the agricultural sector has changed significantly in recent decades: what are the main drivers of change?

And finally, if agricultural development is really important for economic development, why has it not led to more success despite all the effort and investment?

The 5 Sectors Of The Economy

This section presents several factual observations that describe how the agricultural sector has changed in terms of productivity, contribution to economic growth, and indicates the importance of the agricultural sector in poverty alleviation in different regions.

A leading question in the discussion of the role of agriculture in economic development is how agriculture contributes to economic growth and especially to the support of the poor. There is a paradox in the role of agriculture in economic development. The contribution of agriculture to GDP has been decreasing over the years (see Figure 1). At the same time, for example, the productivity of the grain crop increased (see Figure 2). As agriculture becomes more successful, its importance in the overall economy seems to decrease. Of course, other sectors of the economy can be even more successful, such as the Asian Tigers.

A quick reading of Figure 1 might suggest that focusing on other sectors of the economy at the expense of agriculture is a recipe for economic growth. Of course, in retrospect, most observers now agree that the agricultural sector contributes to economic growth, but economic growth reduces the role of agriculture in GDP.

The proportion of the population living in the countryside is also decreasing (see Figure 3), the growing urbanization areas are becoming more and more populated, sometimes very quickly. In South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, the proportion of the rural population is still well over 50%. In other regions of the world, more people now live in urban areas than in rural areas.

Agriculture And Rural Economic Development Advisor

The number of poor people living in cities has increased in parallel with increasing urbanization. Despite this, the proportion of poor people in rural areas is still higher; i.e. there are relatively more poor people in rural areas than in urban areas, estimates vary from 60%.

. The rates vary considerably from country to country (see Table 1), but the main message here is that it is important to focus on reducing poverty in rural areas, where the majority of the poor still live in terms of the proportion and number of poor people.

Table 1: rural and urban poverty in some selected countries (in % of the population below the poverty line)

Agriculture is the main source of employment for the majority of the world’s poor. Overall, the share of agriculture in total employment in developing countries was 53% of the total workforce in 2004. In sub-Saharan Africa, 60% of the economically active population works in agriculture.

Agricultural Adaptations: Farmers In The Forest. Economic Development And Marginal Agriculture In Northern Thailand. Peter Kunstadter, E. C. Chapman, And Sanga Sabhasri, Eds. Published For The East West Center By University Press Of

Many efforts have been made to increase agricultural productivity and calls for more investment in agricultural science and technology, especially in Africa.

. The reasons for this seem obvious when we consider productivity growth in developing countries (see Figure 4). In many regions, (much) progress has been made in increasing land area and/or labor productivity measured in units of quantity emitted

In terms of arable land or labor force per hectare, sub-Saharan Africa has not progressed much. East Asia and the Pacific and South Asia experienced productivity gains in terms of value added per unit of land, but not much in terms of value added per unit of labor. Thus, although progress has been made in increasing productivity in some regions, many others have lagged behind.

When agricultural growth is measured in terms of annual % growth in value added, sub-Saharan Africa has outperformed East Asia and the Pacific over the past 10 years (see Figure 5). Sub-Saharan Africa’s agricultural sector appears to have made some progress towards closing the gap with East Asia and the Pacific.

Agricultural Development And Economic Transformation Ebook By John W. Mellor

Figure 6 shows large differences in agricultural value added (per worker) in different regions of the world. Asia and Africa have very low added value compared to Latin America, Europe or the Middle East. This illustrates the importance of low-cost, subsistence agriculture in Asia and Africa.

In summary, agricultural productivity has increased significantly in most developing regions, with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where labor productivity growth has barely increased, and South Asia has only slightly increased. The Green Revolution and other technological changes that increase productivity seem to have bypassed these regions and the benefits of the Green Revolution are diminishing. Annual agricultural growth has slowed in East Asia, but is fairly steady in sub-Saharan Africa. These figures do not say much about the underlying trends and drivers, which are the subject of the next chapter.

The above section shows with facts and figures how the agricultural sector has changed in the last decades. This section covers some of the general reasons for the variation in facts and figures, although a full discussion of the differences between regions is not included here.

Globalization refers to the increasing integration of economies around the world, particularly through trade and financial flows. The term also sometimes refers to the movement of people (labour) and knowledge (technology) across international borders. Liberalization, in this context, refers to the political reforms carried out by some countries, accompanied by privatization and domestic price reforms.

Discussion: The Role Of Alternative Agricultural Enterprises In A Changing Agricultural Economy

. When the