WSSD: World
Bank Calls on Rich Nations to Reduce Agricultural Subsidies
by Ferial Haffajee
JOHANNESBURG, Aug 21 (IPS) - The World
Bank Wednesday called on rich countries to reduce 1 billion
U.S. dollars they pay in agricultural subsidies as a concrete
gesture toward sustainable development.
Releasing its World Development Report
for 2003 four days ahead of the start of the World Summit
in Johannesburg, the bank's director for development policy
Ian Goldin said, ”Reducing agricultural subsidies are
the single most important area where rich countries can do
something.”
The Bank also said that increased aid
and technology transfer was essential to meeting the Millennium
Development Goals of halving global poverty by 2015.
The goals have been incorporated into
the commitment that over 160 governments are expected to sign
after the United Nations World Summit, on Sep 4.
Europe and the United States are lobbying
to keep agricultural subsidies off the meeting's agenda. But
the report says that, ”Higher agricultural productivity
is crucial to raising incomes in developing countries.”
Regions like Africa depend on agriculture
for about a quarter of total output and are essential to achieving
the 3.5 percent annual growth needed to allow them to meet
the development goals of halving poverty, extending education,
combat HIV/AIDS and extend potable water supplies.
World Bank research on agricultural trade
liberalisation suggests that unrestricted access by developing
countries to developed country's clothing and textile markets
would yield 9 billion U.S. dollars a year, while access to
agricultural markets would also yield 9 billion a year.
Income growth alone was, however, not
enough to ensure sustainable development was achieved. The
bank's report says one of the reasons the Rio Earth Summit
of 1992 has not yielded results is because institutional structures
to deal with social and environmental problems are not strong
enough. These institutions include public and private institutions,
in both the developed North and the developing South.
”The institutions to manage and
protect environmental and social assets are not emerging rapidly
enough to address the consequences of the growing scale and
interconnectedness of human activity,” says the report.
This was the key problem behind the Bank's
somewhat bleak assessment of Rio. Its report card reads as
follows: ”Air: polluted; fresh water: increasingly scarce;
soil: being degraded; forests: being destroyed; biodiversity:
disappearing; fisheries: declining.”
Because of low levels of industrialisation,
Africa was the lowest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions,
but it felt the impact of climate change severely, said a
World Bank lead economist Linda Likar.
This was evident by the growing regularity
of droughts, the cause of the deep food shortages afflicting
southern Africa.
One of the reasons is that 40 percent
of farmland in sub-Saharan is classified as ”fragile
land” - arid zones; slopes; poor soil or in forest ecosystems.
”The inhabitants of these fragile lands account for
a large share of people in extreme poverty,” said Likar.
While urbanisation was increasing, effective
sustainable development still requires rapid rural reform.
Besides reducing agricultural subsidies, another means for
policy-makers to lift agricultural output while protecting
the environment was to tap into indigenous knowledge systems
much more aggressively.
A method of reclaiming degraded land
in Burkina Faso and Niger was being extended to Ghana, said
the report. The ”zai” or ”tassa” method
involves digging holes up to 30 centimetres thick and filling
them with compost, crop residue and manure. These zais attract
termites, which in turn increase water infiltration.
”This technique has tripled yields
and greatly reduced yield loss in dry years,” said Liker.
Using such traditional knowledge was essential to combating
poverty.
The World Development Report is the bank's
key research contribution to the World Summit. It found that
10 years was too short a timeframe to place on the next global
assessment of the planet's wellbeing. ”The emphasis
of this report is not on identifying a specific set of policies
or outcomes considered advantageous but on the processes by
which such policies and outcomes are selected,” says
the report.
While lobbying against the World Bank
has seen a change in its policy prescriptions since the mid-Nineties,
elements of the report's recommendations are like red flags
to activists. It is, for example, still laced with pay for
use principles to guide water and energy policies. (END/2002)
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