globalization potential trade and asareca：全球化潜在的贸易和asareca

1、Eastern and Central Africa Programme for Agricultural Policy Analysis*A Programme of the Association for Strengthening AgriculturalResearch in Eastern and Central Africa*Electronic Newsletter27 July 2007-Volume 10 Number 14NEWSAppointmentProfessor Pene Mbutu Onyembe who has been a member of the ECAP

2、APA Steering Committee has been appointed the Director General of the Institute for Agricultural and Environmental Research (INERA). ECAPAPA congratulates Prof. Onyembe and wishes him well in this new assignment.Death of Luis Navarro, IDRCIt is with great sadness that we share the news of the passin

3、g away of our dear colleague and friend Luis Navarro on July 12, 2007, in Chile. He was laid to rest on Saturday July 14th 2007. Luis worked in various functions related to the Environment and Natural Resource management (ENRM) programming at the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) base

4、d in the Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Office in Nairobi since 1989. He spent the last months in Chile surrounded by family while fighting cancer. He was a founding member of ASARECA and ECAPAPA and we will remember him always as a collegial, sensitive, thoughtful and committed person. He was

5、 an important and valued mentor and advisor to colleagues, new and not so new, and deeply respected by partners in the field. Through his work he embraced the fundamental values and ideas that are at the heart of the Centres work. Luis will be sorely missed by those who worked with him. Our thoughts

6、 are with the family and his near and dear ones in support of their loss of a loved one. RURAL DEVELOPMENT AND POVERTY REDUCTION: IS AGRICULTURE STILL THE KEY?Globally, extreme poverty continues to be a rural phenomenon despite increasing urbanization. However, public policies at national level and

7、resource mobilization at both national and international levels have not always recognized the multiple potential of the rural economy. Public policies and investments in developing countries have historically favoured industrial, urban and service sectors at the expense of agricultural and other ru

8、ral sector development. In many cases, a coherent rural development policy has fallen victim of the lack of a cross-sectoral institutional framework. Gustavo Anriquez and Kostas Stamoulis present some of the conceptual issues regarding the role of agriculture in both rural and overall development, e

9、mphasizing its role in poverty reduction; and explore if agricultural development can be an engine of growth and poverty reduction in developing countries.IntroductionTHE past 20 years have witnessed a steep decline in the availability of public resources for agriculture and rural development. Betwe

10、en 1983-1987 and 1998-2000, the annual average allocations of Official Development Assistance (ODA) for agriculture in the least developed and other low-income countries fell by 57 percent from USD 5.14 billion (2002 prices) to USD 2.22 billion. Lending from international financial institutions foll

11、owed a similar pattern while domestic public spending has remained stagnant at best. The result has been reduced incentives for rural investment. Serious questions have also been raised as to the efficiency and effectiveness of public resource mobilization for agriculture and the rural space. An imp

12、ortant question in the development debate regarding rural development has been the relationship between agriculture and the rural economy. In certain respects, past policy perceptions and practice have often equated rural development with agriculture, and rural development policies have been subsume

13、d under an agricultural policy package. The issue of how and under what conditions agriculture is a driving force of rural growth has received scant attention or has given mixed messages including in the position of major multilateral financing institutions.Recently however, the emergence of nationa

14、l and international commitments on poverty and related targets (as for instance in the Millennium Development Goals and the Poverty Reduction Strategies at country level) coupled with the failure of past paradigms to make mass reductions in rural poverty, have given a new impetus to the role of agri

15、culture in development and poverty reduction. While at the same time, new rural development models have emerged emphasizing a more broad approach in which rural and urban space are viewed as a continuum and their interactions are emphasized.The importance of agriculture in developmentHistorical pers

16、pectivesEconomists as early as the beginning of the 20th century observed that wealthier countries were characterized by a smaller portion of their output coming from agriculture and relatively less labour resources tied to the same sector. They also noted that the process of development was charact

17、erized by a monotonic decline in the relative importance of agriculture the primary sector in the economy, both in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and employment. Therefore, if the process of development is characterized by a shrinking agricultural sector, should the development “recipe” then

18、suggest policies that are biased against agriculture (in favour of other sectors of the economy) to accelerate development; or should agricultural growth be promoted to facilitate this structural transformation? If one looks at history, and recounts the policies that developing countries implemented

19、 from the late 1950s until the 1980s, particularly in Africa and Latin America, it would seem that they followed the first strategy.Some economists argued that agriculture plays an important role in development. One of the first arguments in favour of the role of agriculture is that there are large

20、sectors of the economy where the marginal productivity of labour is negligible, zero, or even negative. Of course these labour resources are tied to the primary sector, and are a key ingredient for industrial growth, which will occur thanks to a growing labour force coming from the primary sector. H

21、ence, the primary sector plays, although passive, an important role in development. Later, economists identified the following roles that the agricultural sector performs throughout the development path:i) Providing food necessary for a growing economy, as food demand, although at a decreasing rate,

22、 grows with income; ii) Generating the foreign exchange necessary to import capital goods; iii) As the larger sector in less developed countries, it is the only sector capable of generating the savings mass that the non-agricultural sector needs for capital accumulation; and iv) A growing agricultur

23、al sector creates a larger local market for the non-agricultural sector. These linkages still remain relevant for developing economies with a large primary sector. Successful industrialization experiences are usually preceded by periods of dynamic agricultural growth. Although this does not amount t

24、o a causality link, countries that embark on a successful industrialization path, first experience fast agricultural expansion, fueled not by absorbing resources from the rest of the economy, but by rapid increases in productivity. As a matter of fact, countries that have been able to industrialize

25、without having first an agricultural expansion are the exception.Towards a new perspective of the role of agriculture in developmentAgricultures production linkages and developmentLinkages in the agricultural sector are easy to identify: forward linkages are mainly in the agricultural and food-proce

26、ssing industries, in the service industry with the restaurant and hotel industries and, sometimes, public schooling. Similarly the main backward linkages are with the agricultural industries that produce animal feed, with the chemical and mineral industry for purchased fertilizers, and, depending on

27、 the degree of sophistication of the agricultural sector with the financial and business services sector and the industry of machinery manufacture. In many developing countries, backward industries consist of a large number of small firms (fertilizer mixing, small scale transport, agricultural imple

28、ment repair, commerce, among others) largely labour intensive and vital for the rural economy. As the agricultural sector becomes more developed, its backward linkages increase by requiring more financial services, machinery and other purchased inputs. Also, the forward linkages are more important i

29、n a developed economy, where there is an existing and more developed food industry, and equivalently a hotel and restaurant industry. Therefore, common wisdom suggests that in terms of linkages, agriculture would not be a good sector to promote in early stages of development, because its linkages (a

30、nd thus its multiplying effect) are low. These are important questions of rural and overall development that have rarely been studied systematically.Agricultures pro-poor roleNot all growth experiences are equal. There is a growing focus on the importance of a “pro-poor growth” defined as growth (an

31、 increase in average income/purchasing power) that is also accompanied by an improvement in the distribution of income. There is ample theoretical support and empirical evidence that suggests that agriculture is pro-poor, and that growth based on the expansion of the sector is pro-poor growth. How a

32、gricultural growth helps poverty alleviationi) Directly by increasing the income/own consumption of small farmers: Small holders are usually not only inadequately endowed with land, but usually also lack other assets, like physical and human capital, and thus are usually poor. Expansion of the agric

33、ultural sector may benefit also the small-holder sector and pull some of them out of poverty. Small farms are, with respect to capital and land utilization, labour intensive (own family labour), and therefore are likely to benefit from technological progress that is labour intensive. When land distr

34、ibution is equitable, it will be the case that expansion of agriculture will benefit the small-holder sector; when the land distribution is inequitable there could be agricultural growth fully based on large farm output expansion, in which case the small holder sector would not necessarily benefit.

35、ii) Indirectly by reducing food prices: Most measures of poverty are based, directly or indirectly in the cost of access to food. When the price of food is reduced, there is a two-way accounting improvement in the welfare of the poor. In the first place their real income increases, and more so than

36、the wealthier, because food is the main component of their consumption basket. At the same time, the poverty line which is usually used to measure poverty is decreased, which acts to alleviate poverty. In a completely open economy without any additional transaction costs, the price of food should no

37、t be affected by agricultural growth in the same country. However, not all food is tradable; many perishable vegetables are for all purposes non-tradable. In addition, the bulk of cereal staple foods produced and consumed by the poor in rural areas are traded in local markets which, due to high tran

38、sactions costs are disconnected from larger (including international) markets. iii) Indirectly by increasing the income generated by the non-farm rural economy: The rural non-farm economy in most regions is either: mostly composed of goods and services that directly serve agriculture, or indirectly

39、depend of the demand of those tied to agriculture. The more disconnected the rural economy is from urban markets, the more dependent is the rural non-farm sector on the income generated by what is usually the main engine of the rural economy: agriculture. Hence, agricultural growth can increase the

40、demand for the goods and service of the rural non-farm sector and help pull out of poverty households tied to this sector. iv) Indirectly by raising employment and wages of the unskilled: Agriculture is usually intensive in unskilled labour. Thus, agricultural growth through an increase in unskilled

41、 labour demand will increase unskilled employment and/or the wages of the unskilled, most of which are poor. There is here a general equilibrium effect, because raising the unskilled wages in agriculture pushes upward the unskilled wages in urban areas also. This latter general equilibrium effect wi

42、ll be higher the more integrated rural and urban labour markets are.Given these channels through which agriculture reduces poverty, it should come as no surprise that the overwhelming empirical evidence shows that agricultural growth is not only pro-poor, but more pro-poor than other sectors of the

43、economy. The key in this fundamental result lies in that all four channels described benefit the poorest households of the economy more than the rest. As agriculture makes its transformation into commercial farming, the direct effect of the sector on small and poor farmers becomes much smaller, but

44、commercial farmers are employers of unskilled labour; and concomitantly with the commercial farm transformation and their interaction with world markets, generally rural economies become interlinked with the rest of the economy, in particular with urban markets. These are the preconditions for agric

45、ulture to have an important effect on the employment and wages of unskilled workers. Agriculture and rural developmentThere is no direct measurement to uncover the importance of agriculture within the rural economy, but there are alternative roads which indirectly point to that measure. Agriculture

46、is an important component of most rural economies especially in the developing countries. The size of agriculture within the local economy is sometimes used to define rurality. Therefore, any successful rural development strategy will contain an agricultural development component; but they are not t

47、he same thing. While agricultural development aims at improving the welfare of populations through sustained improvements in the productivity of the agricultural sector, rural development aims at the improvement of welfare of rural populations through the sustained growth of the rural economy, which

48、 includes agriculture, but may not be its only component and not necessarily the most dynamic.Ideally, if one wanted to know the importance of agriculture within a rural area, they would look at the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or output figure for that region, and measure the share of agricultural

49、output within the total value added of the region. Unfortunately only few countries have aggregate output figures available by region (state or province), and even at this regional level, output is aggregated for both rural and urban areas. Poorer countries, with lower per capita income, and with hi

50、gher incidence of poverty, not only are more rural, but in their economies agriculture has a higher relative weight. Thus, the poorer the economy, the more important agriculture is for its rural and overall development.Another road to measure the value of agriculture in the rural economy is to exami

51、ne the share of income from agriculture to total rural income. This can be done, thanks to household surveys that measure income, most of them implemented in developing countries since the 1950s to understand poverty. Unfortunately, the way researchers have measured rural agricultural income vis-

52、24;-vis non-agricultural income (also known as rural non-farm income) has varied too much. Examples of these conceptual inconsistencies are: to add remittances (which in countries like Pakistan and in Central America can amount to more than 5 percent and even 10 percent of household incomes) to rura

53、l non-farm income, when remittances are not rural (sometimes not even national) income. Other inconsistencies arise with income from wages of agricultural labour. Some authors add wages accrued in farms outside their own to non-farm income, when it is clear that this is agricultural income. Further

54、problems arise when wage income due to the absence of information can not be assigned to any particular sector, in these cases all of wage income can be added to either the farm or non-farm sector. Some authors even add food sales to non farm income. Then there are gray areas, like the way in which

55、to value own agricultural consumption; or income from fishing and forestry that could be added to either farm or non-farm income. These conceptual differences and inconsistencies highlight the need for comparable measures of agricultural and nonagricultural rural income to make further meaningful cr

56、oss-country comparisons and studies.Conclusions and some policy implicationsThe last few years have seen an increased attention of the international development community on agriculture and rural development. If the data for the last 3 years constitute a real trend then we are witnessing a real incr

57、ease in official development assistance to agriculture and rural development. The emergence of private donors and foundations with keen interest in transferring resources to agriculture is a welcome development. Major multilateral donors are looking at agriculture as an engine for poverty reduction

58、for most developing countries and regions and a fundamental component of a growth and poverty reduction strategy for the poorest, agriculture based economies. There seems to be increased interest by domestic and foreign private capital (including multinational agro-industrial firms) for investments in sectors up and downstream of production agriculture. The potential of agriculture as a source of bio-energy promises to attract further attention to the potential of the sector to produce and address global food and energy needs.Agriculture and the rural economy are fundamental for obtaining sub