The World Bank's 2008 World Development Report

The 2008 World Development Report will be on "Agriculture for Development in changing world". It argues that agriculture can play five essential functions for development: a source of overall economic growth, an instrument for poverty reduction, a business opportunity, a provider of environment services, and a tool for food security. Yet, these functions have been under-and mis-used, calling for major redress in the way governments and international donors use agriculture as a key instrument for development.

Agriculture has indeed been at the origin of multiple development successes, sometimes stunning like initiating accelerated growth and sustaining massive poverty reduction in China and India, the awakening giants that harbor some 40 percent of humanity. There are also disastrous failures in using the powers of agriculture as an instrument for development, most particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, which is cursed by continuing economic stagnation, mass poverty, pervasiveness of disastrous diseases such as HIV/AIDS, and the periodic recurrence of intolerable famines. So, how did agriculture help where it worked for development, and what could be done to make it work where it has to this day failed to deliver its development powers? This is the issue addressed in the World Development Report (WDR) 2008 by the World Bank.

Agriculture has five functions in economic development that make it totally unique. They are:

1. a source of national economic growth
2. an instrument for poverty reduction
3. an opportunity for profitable business investments
4. a source of natural resources for urban use and of environmental services
5. an instrument for food security in the poorest countries 

with no foreign exchange earnings to import their food needs.

Cambodian farmers are transplanting in their paddy field