Agriculture’s
‘strong interactions’
A working document for the planned 2008 World Development Report offers this definition:
“For the WDR, the agricultural sector will be defined to include crops, livestock, agroforestry, and aquaculture within a broad commodity-chain approach from producer to consumer. It will also include the main natural resources, soil and water, on which agriculture is based, and the human resources and social capital linked to the sector, with appropriate attention to gender. While the focus will be on agriculture, many of the themes treated by the WDR will require recognition of the strong interactions between the farm and nonfarm sectors, within a broader rural livelihoods approach.”
Editors Byerlee and de Janvry are hunting for “high standards of evidence”
World Bank’s ‘flagship’ development report will focus on agriculture for first time in 26 years
The Global Donor Platform has agreed to help provide content for the 30th edition of the World Bank’s annual World Development Report (WDR), one of the development community’s most important vehicles for debate and dialogue.
With actual publication of WDR 2008 little more than a year away, members of the Platform Steering Committee held talks with WDR planners in Paris on June 13 and 14, 2006 to identify prospective contributors to the report.
The main task will be helping the WDR team hold regional consultations that can provide a basis for “well-founded policy conclusions”, as called for in a  14-page draft prospectus currently circulating among possible contributors to the upcoming opus.
The WDRs claim the largest circulation of any international economic report in the world. The reports usually weigh in at around 300 pages, carefully nurture an image of editorial independence and empirical rigour and are considered essential reading. Each edition is said to cost the World Bank’s core budget from $3.5 to $5 million, and print-runs can go from 50,000 to 100,000 copies in English alone, with smaller numbers printed in seven other languages.
Preparation of WDR 2008 will be led by the Australian  Derek Byerlee, most recently the lead economist for agriculture and natural resources for the World Bank in Addis Ababa, and Frenchman Alain de Janvry, Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California at Berkeley. Their intention is to work with authors from a wide variety of organisations who will be “selected for the quality of their recent research and their overall breadth of knowledge of the topic.”
This is the first time that the WDR has focused exclusively on agriculture since the 1982 edition. Much has changed in the sector — and in development approaches — since then, and WDR 2008 offers an opportunity to highlight these new trends before a worldwide audience, according to Platform Co-Chairman Christoph Kohlmeyer. “The message is going to be all about what’s new in agriculture”, he says. “It’s hard to underestimate the immense convening power of the WDR. It will spell out for millions of readers the issues that are close to our hearts.”
Christian Henckes, a World Bank adviser on operations policy and member of the Platform Steering Committee, agrees. “This should be a win-win situation”, he says. “Agriculture could benefit greatly from in-depth treatment in the WDR and the WDR itself should benefit from the Platform’s input. Besides that, the whole exercise will strengthen the Platform’s own information network.”
The editors plan to post a detailed story outline on the web in October, 2006, complete a first internal draft by December 25th this year, and stage an electronic forum for comments in mid-April next year. The final version is scheduled for launch in September, 2007.
“Agriculture is largely a private sector activity, so why do we need another WDR on agriculture?”, the Bank asks in the draft prospectus. The rationale it provides points to the inability of market forces alone to address the MDGs of hunger alleviation and environmental protection. According to the document, “the public sector generally has a greater role to play in agriculture than is the case for other sectors of the economy, particularly at the early stages of development.”
The consultations leading to creation of the WDR are key, and will include extensive meetings and special seminars with researchers, policy makers, civil society, and the private sector. However, editorial production is on a tight time line. And given the breadth and complexity of the subject, the challenge facing the editors, in the words of former World Bank economist Joe Stiglitz, who himself served stints as a WDR editor, is to “integrate and synthesise the many (and often conflicting) comments received”.
Whatever its analysis and findings, WDR 2008 is not likely to offer a panacea for poverty, but it should spark at least as much debate as past reports. Said previous World Bank President James Wolfensohn in 1998, the report “should not just be reciting generic recipes but raising fundamental questions that have no easy answers.”
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Platform News No 2