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The Changing Face of Rural Space : Agriculture and Rural Development in the Western BalkansThis report brings together lessons from previous studies, supplemented by new analysis. It frames the challenges facing the rural and agri-food sector in the Western Balkans to illustrate the directions for policies, now and in the future. Part one looks at the characteristics of the rural and agri-food sector today, its potential and its obstacles. Part two looks at the future of the agri-food sector and rural space. Value chains will change with more competitive imports, with larger retailers influencing value chains, and with farmers and processors needing to respond to these trends by producing goods that meet quality and safety standards consistently and reliably. These changes will drive the modernization of agriculture, leading to an agri-food sector with fewer and more productive farms. Beyond the agri-food sector, effective rural development programs will be needed to ensure that agriculture's modernization is balanced and equitable. Local authorities and rural communities will have to be involved in developing and implementing territorial strategies for leveraging the non-farm potential of rural areas. Food safety standards will become more important as countries strive to meet private and public standards, and climate change will introduce uncertainty and compel farmers to adapt. Part three provides a roadmap to help governments create a strong and healthy rural and agri-food sector able to respond to these challenges. It looks first at the strategy that should drive public spending in agriculture and the composition of that spending. It then looks at how governments can best provide public services to agriculture, in extension advisory services, agricultural information services, and agricultural education and research. The report's aim is to enable governments and donors to have a common vision of the goals and directions of their policies and programs. It identifies future threats and challenges to the sector, and provides a framework of outcomes and objectives to inform future government policies and donor assistance to the sector.
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Agriculture and Development : A Brief Review of the LiteratureAfter 20 years of neglect by international donors, agriculture is now again in the headlines because higher food prices are increasing food insecurity and poverty. In the coming years it will be essential to increase food productivity and production in developing countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and with smallholders. This however requires finding viable solutions to a number of complex technical, institutional and policy issues including land markets, research on seeds and inputs; agricultural extension; credit; rural infrastructure; storage; connection to markets; rural nonfarm employment and food price stabilization. This paper reviews what the economic literature has to say on these topics. It discusses in turn the role played by agriculture in the development process and the interactions between agriculture and other economic sectors; the determinants of the Green Revolution and discuss the foundations of agricultural growth; issues of income diversification by farmers; approaches to rural development; and finally issues of international trade policy and food security which are at the root of the crisis in agricultural commodity volatility in the past few years.
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Rural Transport : Improving its Contribution to Growth and Poverty Reduction in Sub-Saharan AfricaPoverty reduction is a long-standing development objective of many developing countries and their aid donors, including the World Bank. To achieve this goal, these countries and organizations have sought to improve smallholder agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) as part of a broader rural development agenda aimed at providing a minimal basket of goods and services in rural areas to satisfy basic human needs. These goods and services include not only food, health care, and education, but also infrastructure. As a result, rural transport remains a constraint to increasing agricultural productivity, achieving rural growth, and thus alleviating rural poverty. The first major finding of the review of rural transport theory and practice is that many of the approaches needed to improve the impact of rural transport interventions on poverty reduction are known, particularly from the work of the Rural Travel and Transport Program (RTTP) of Sub-Saharan Africa Transport Policy Program (SSATP). Unfortunately, many of the recommended approaches remain untested within Sub-Saharan Africa beyond the pilot scale, notwithstanding their influence on rural transport policy and project design in other operational regions of the Bank. For SSA, these are missed opportunities. Even where SSA countries have applied these approaches, institutional and financial sustainability and scaling up local successes remain significant challenges for both their agriculture and transport sectors. The second key finding is that rural households are rarely the point of focus in the design of rural transport interventions in SSA, even though a methodology to allow this focus has been developed and successfully tested in several pilot projects since the 1980s, the result is that the transport needs of rural households continue to be analyzed and understood by means of an indirect assessment of those needs, which means that most projects have a less than desirable impact on improving the rural access and mobility situation of such households.