The World Bank is Still Wobbly on the Future of Agriculture

On October 16th of this year the World Bank held a conference at its headquarters in Washington, D.C., called “The Future of Rural Space” which addressed the current panorama facing the rural world from a global perspective and potential solutions to some of its problems from transnational, national, and local experiences, with contributions from the Bank’s Vice President of Sustainable Development, Laura Tuck, and a multisectoral panel: Alka Upadhyaya, Additional Secretary in India’s Ministry of Rural Development; Prosper Mulindwa, Vice Mayor in charge of Economic Development in Rwanda’s Rulindo District; Henk Smith, farmer and board member of the conglomerate of Dutch farmers’ cooperatives BoerenNatuur; Patricia Gichinga, Head of Productions at the Mediae Company, a producer of educational agricultural content in Kenya; and Ignacio Martínez, board member at American research and investing companies Indigo Ag and Flagship Pioneering.
Laura Tuck began with some remarks on current conditions and future projections for the rural world, in addition to the difficulties and opportunities that come from them. Her introduction can be interpreted as the official position of the Bank given her high rank and invitation to open the conference. She presented, as a counterpoint to the high and frequently-cited levels of global urban population, that in the year 2050 global rural population will only have dropped by 300,000 people compared to today; this, added to the dependence of urban sectors on rural food production and balanced ecological systems implies that the problems that face the rural environment merit examination. Furthermore, the World Bank’s client countries (which is to say, developing countries) have proportions of their populations that live in rural areas which exceed the global average.
She noted that rural dwellers suffer from deforestation and degradation of the rural environment, pronounced vulnerability to climate change, and a lack of access to basic services, all of which drive migration and brain drain; as follows, the share of global extreme poverty found in rural areas increased around 20% in the last two decades. Nonetheless, Tuck and the Bank see five opportunities for the rural world: increase agricultural productivity to reduce poverty, leverage new science and technology to solve problems, feed growing markets in agribusiness and tourism, empower women; and manage land for incomes and outcomes.
However, the Bank’s proposals do not address the roots of the problems presented, and could even intensify them. Betting on private capital — the model and experience that the conference moderator openly favored vis-à-vis Martínez’s comments — can create production solutions, but it won’t fix access to basic services and won’t necessarily slow down environmental degradation or deforestation. Likewise, the emphasis on increasing productivity and tying it to agribusiness and tourism doesn’t address the conditions that rural people find themselves in. Putting faith in new technologies doesn’t take into account existing power and production concentration and debt cycles in the rural world, all of which will most likely become more deeply entrenched under this model and won’t be moved by the simple fact of producing more. And although it is positive to recognize that being more environmentally friendly is also good for agricultural yields and that promoting female leadership in the countryside is fundamental, it remains to be seen if these will be enough to overcome the flaws of the other proposals.
It’s also worth mentioning that the conference displayed a substantial weakness in not having a representative from Latin America, given that the region has strong leadership and expertise in the topics discussed in addition to poverty levels much more relevant to the World Bank than those of the Netherlands or the United States.
A 1991 World Bank-sponsored study of 68 development projects in rural contexts around the world found that the most successful projects, in addition to being compatible with local cultures, avoided two errors: “over innovation” (requiring excessive changes) and “under differentiation” (assuming that different situations are more similar than they actually are). In 2019 the World Bank continues to suggest solutions that suffer from one or the other. Instead, the proposals presented by the Bank in this conference bring sure benefits, but don’t contribute to the explicit goal of the Bank — that is, to end poverty — and don’t guarantee solutions for climate change, which was prioritized during the entire conference over any structural or democratizing changes. Coming from an institution with the background of the World Bank, this apparent lack of vision seems disingenuous.

