Agriculture for Development: Toward a New Paradigm

By D. Byerlee, A. de Janvry, E. Sadoulet. 2009

422 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The fundamental role that agriculture plays in development has long been recognized. In the seminal work on the subject, agriculture was seen as a source of contributions that helped induce industrial growth and a structural transformation of the economy. However, globalization, integrated value chains, rapid technological and institutional innovations, and environmental constraints have deeply changed the context for agriculture's role. We argue that a new paradigm is needed that recognizes agriculture's multiple functions for development in that emerging context: triggering economic growth, reducing poverty, narrowing income disparities, providing food security, and delivering environmental services. Yet, governments and donors have neglected these functions of agriculture with the result that agriculture growth has been reduced, 75p of world poverty is rural, sectoral income disparities have exploded, food insecurity has returned, and environmental degradation is widespread, compromising sustainability. Mobilizing these functions requires shifting the political economy to overcome antiagriculture policy biases, strengthening governance for agriculture, and tailoring priorities to country conditions.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0fe0cab258bce6d7b98ce92f39a601cb037d9f33

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

1. P. Pingali
2. Geoffrey Kiprotich Sigei
3. C. Sage
4. T. Reardon
5. M. Qaim
6. G. Rasul
7. L. Klerkx
8. D. Rose

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Dalila Cervantes-Godoy
2. P. Pingali
3. J. Dewbre
4. Geoffrey Kiprotich Sigei

Citations in the corpus

• Economic Importance of Agriculture for Poverty Reduction (2010, background): “ Byerlee, de Janvry and Sadoulet (2009) report findings from World Bank (World Bank, 2008b) analysis showing that migration from rural to urban areas accounted for less than 20% of the reduction in rural poverty during 1993-2002.”
• Green Revolution: Impacts, limits, and the path ahead (2012, background): “There is also an increasing awareness of the detrimental impacts of climate change on food security, especially for tropical agriculture systems in low-income countries (Byerlee et al. 2009; Parry et al. 2005; Parry et al. 2004; Stern 2007; Fischer et al. 2005).”