'Promoting agriculture is imperative for meeting MDG'

World development report has warned that global food supplies are under pressure from expanding demand for food, feed, and biofuels; the rising price of energy; and increasing land and water scarcity; as well as the effects of climate change. This in turn is contributing to uncertainty about future food prices.
WB report mentioned that agriculture consumes 85 percent of the world's utilised water and the sector contributes to deforestation, land degradation, and pollution.
WB report says in agriculture-based countries-home to 417 million rural people, 170 million of whom live on less than $1 a day, the agricultural sector is essential to overall growth, poverty reduction, and food security. Most of these countries are in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the sector employs 65 percent of the labour force and generates 32 percent of GDP growth.
In South Asia, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka are considered transforming countries, while Afghanistan and Nepal are classified as agriculture-based countries.
WB report suggested that transforming countries should be generated rural jobs by diversifying into the "new agriculture" of high-value products such as fruit, vegetables and dairy products for which there is increasing demand as urban incomes rise. Transforming countries should also invest heavily in human capital to prepare rural people for better jobs in rural areas and to help them successfully migrate.
To reduce the environmental footprint of intensive agriculture, confronting acute land and water scarcity, and develop lagging regions, WB report suggested.
Commenting over the "Agriculture-based Countries", WB report said that in Afghanistan and Nepal, the main priority is to increase productivity, especially among smallholders whose livelihoods depend strongly on agriculture.
WB report says rich countries need to reform policies, which harm the poor. For example, it is vital that the United States reduces cotton subsidies, which depress prices for African smallholders. In the emerging area of biofuels, the problem is both restrictive tariffs and heavy subsidies in rich countries, which drive up food prices and limit export opportunities for efficient developing country producers. The report also asserts that industrialised countries that were the major contributors to global warming urgently need to do more to help poor farmers adapt their production systems to climate change.
Agriculture can be the main source of growth for the agriculture-based countries and can reduce poverty and improve the environment in all three country types, albeit in different ways. This requires improving the asset position of the rural poor, making smallholder farming more competitive and sustainable, diversifying income sources toward the labor market and the rural non-farm economy, and facilitating successful migration out of agriculture.
Pursuing an agriculture-for-development agenda for a country implies defining what to do and how to do it. What to do requires a policy framework anchored on the behaviour of agents-producers and their organisations, the private sector in value chains, and the state. How to do it, requires effective governance to muster political support and implementation capacity, again based on the behaviour of agents-the state, civil society, the private sector, donors, and global institutions.
In the 21st century, WB report said that the agriculture continues to be a fundamental instrument for sustainable development and poverty reduction. Three of every four poor people in developing countries live in rural areas-2.1 billion living on less than $2 a day and 880 million on less than $1 a day-and most depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. Given where they are and what they do best, promoting agriculture is imperative for meeting the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving poverty and hunger by 2015 and continuing to reduce poverty and hunger for several decades thereafter.
Agriculture alone will not be enough to massively reduce poverty, but it has proven to be uniquely powerful for that task. With the last world development report on agriculture completed 25 years ago, it is time to place agriculture afresh at the center of the development agenda, taking account of the vastly different context of opportunities and challenges that has emerged.
This Report addresses three main questions: 1 What can agriculture do for development? 2 What are effective instruments in using agriculture for development? 3 How can agriculture-for-development agendas best be implemented?
Agriculture's contributions differ in the three rural worlds. The way agriculture works for development varies across countries depending on how they rely on agriculture as a source of growth and an instrument for poverty reduction.