McNamara’s Legacy: Food, Agriculture and Rural Development
Uma Lele - 21 August 2009
The development community lacks a coherent strategy towards food and agriculture. The international aid architecture is in disarray. A recent study suggests that only $38 billion of the $100 billion plus aid goes to long-term development assistance, and only half of this may reach the intended beneficiaries. Another that very little of it goes to food and agriculture. The Doha round is in limbo because of disagreements on agricultural policy reforms between developed and developing countries.
Robert McNamara, World Bank President from 1968-1981 who died in July 2009, made a substantial contribution to global food, agriculture and poverty reduction. It is worth considering at a time of growing population pressure, stagnant agricultural productivity, pervasive under nutrition, rapid urbanisation, climate change, the associated water crisis, and the multi-trillion dollar global financial rescue. Collectively these challenges call for a vigorous international focus on the world's poor once again with a broad, long-term vision that contains agriculture and rural development at its core.
During the 1970s McNamara placed agricultural development at the centre stage and helped establish farsighted public strategy and public institutions at the global, regional and country levels. I joined the Bank in 1971 when it was recruiting scores of technical experts including irrigation engineers, agronomists, financial analysts, foresters and agricultural economists together with health and population experts.
What worked in Asia
McNamara's efforts in agriculture at the country-level had tremendous positive impacts in Asia but showed little fruit in Africa, because conditions were radically different. In Asia a combination of the Bank's policy/ strategy advice and lending to food and agriculture, combined with McNamara's critical role in the launching of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in 1972, made major contributions to ensuring food security. India was then the most successful case of a turnaround in food production although Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines and Bangladesh were not far behind. In four years India turned from a food deficit to a food secure country.
In the early 1970s, Asian countries saw prioritisation of food and agriculture as a political imperative. The failed import substitution strategies of the 1960s had been accompanied by frequent droughts and hunger. At its peak India had imported 10 million tons of food aid. Support of the peasantry, and of the vocal urban consumers was essential for gaining political legitimacy at home and keeping communism at bay. Whether democrats or autocrats, Asian policymakers realised the urgent need for their countries to feed themselves and put money in the pockets of peasants.
Nearly 40 per cent of IDA went to India. The Bank's pragmatic policy advice, and even conditionality, to promote public sector interventions was a boost to India's achievement of domestic food self sufficiency. Advisors had realised that even the most efficient grain markets were not able to address risks farmers faced in the adoption of new green revolution technologies.
Although aid to agriculture was small relative to the size of their economies and Asian countries were centralised, they possessed the necessary administrative capacity to implement programs to deliver services to farmers. Due to the large size and low openness of their economies, they were not as badly affected by the adverse external commodity price shocks as Africa or Latin America. They enjoyed politically stability. The result of domestic priority to, and investment in, agriculture combined with wise external advice and assistance on strategy was a Green Revolution in agriculture throughout much of Asia.
What went wrong in Africa?
In Africa in 1975 the Bank was already financing a variety of well-motivated integrated projects in food and export crop production which relied on the Bank's internal technical expertise on agriculture - staffed largely by experts with substantial experience and knowledge of colonial Africa. Unlike Asian countries which were too large for direct rule, and were largely administered by nationals, African countries lacked native capacity. Designed by expatriates, externally funded projects were based on external expertise. The projects often entailed extension of tried and trusted colonial approaches to service delivery in support of modes of small holder food and export crop production.
USAID continued to make concurrent investments in Land Grant type universities, much as it did in Asia, in seed production and distribution systems. But the externally funded projects were too large and complex for the capacity of African countries to implement.
The 1980s and 90s
By the end of the 1970s a combination of factors led integrated agricultural and rural development projects to run into implementation difficulties. Lending to agriculture and rural development peaked in 1984, and declined thereafter with rise of adjustment lending. Many institutions supported in the 1970s were dismantled without being replaced. My post-McNamara study on Aid to African Agriculture in the 1980s noted that 'institutional and technological problems in the rural sector remained by far the greatest impediment to economic growth', due in part to domestic policies but also due to a collective donor failure. It called for a fundamental redirection of donor assistance to capacity building with massive investments in higher education and training and institution building in Africa as part of a long term predictable assistance to agriculture and rural development.
Macro economic reforms in the 1990s paved the way for African agricultural expansion but without institutions or the domestic administrative capacity to prioritise and implement investments. Institutionally and technologically the 1990s turned out to be a lost decade for agriculture and rural development.
Today's Challenges
Africa's challenges today are different than those of Asian countries in the 1970s. Africa's food aid needs are not large enough to be alarming to the international community, although overall requirements are growing rapidly. It is unclear if African leaders feel the pressure either from their peasantry or from the urban masses to produce sufficient food domestically. Rain-fed agriculture offers less spectacular technological possibilities than irrigation. There is need for investment in irrigation, but no history of irrigation or its management in Africa. Even Asians with their long history of irrigation now face mounting environmental challenges.
Asia still contains the world's largest number of poor people. Unlike in the 1970s, there is perhaps a sense of complacency and a weak political will to tackle the emerging challenges of small and non-viable farms, stagnant productivity, growing cost of production, unsustainable uses of land and water, cheap subsidised food and agricultural imports, problems which call for a complex blend of institutional and technological solutions and a new conversation on trade liberalisation in agriculture.
The World Bank and donors lack the technocratic capacity, the ideological flexibility or the necessary cohesion to bring pragmatic solutions to continents where there are few easy answers. It is unclear if African or Asian agriculture can feed its poor without domestic commitment, long-term investments in designing and delivering services, a commitment to science and technology, and a strategy of walking on two legs of agriculture and industry.
Uma Lele is a member of the Institute of Development Studies' Board of Trustees and Former Senior Advisor in the Independent Evaluation Group, formerly the Operations Evaluation Department at the World Bank
This article is based on a longer version that first appeared on the World Bank's 1818 Society pages
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