The central finding of the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) report on the Bank’s agricultural programmes in Sub-Saharan Africa between 1991 and 2006 was that the Bank, donors and governments have neglected agriculture. What limited Bank activity there has been has performed “below par”. In the period studied, the Bank channelled $2.8 billion in investment lending to agriculture, constituting just 8 per cent of its investment lending to the region.

The authors level a series of withering critiques at the Bank’s work, including:

• On seeds: Having encouraged governments to close their public seed companies, “Bank projects have not been very successful in promoting private sector participation in seed production”;
• On soil fertility: “The Bank does not appear to have engaged its African clients in serious policy dialogue about the region’s declining soil fertility.”;
• On access to water: while identifying the need for supporting irrigation, the Bank has done “very limited lending for that purpose”.;
• On biodiversity: “little evidence that the Bank has adapted activities to diverse agro-ecological conditions”;
• On transport: The Bank has made a “limited contribution to improving transport infrastructure for market access”;
• On agricultural extension: “Private extension generally is skewed towards well-endowed regions and high-value crops”;
• On credit: “Few investment operations have attempted to address the credit constraint of smallholders”;
• On land reform: The Bank has shown “inadequate appreciation of the time that is required to build consensus around sensitive issues such as land reform”; and
• On marketing reform: “In most reforming countries the private sector did not step in to fill the vacuum when the public sector withdrew.” Results fell short of expectations due to “inadequate background analytical work, weak political support, and insufficient appreciation of the system’s incentives”.

The evaluators conclude that “despite its presence for more than two decades in several countries, Bank support has so far not been able to help countries increase agricultural productivity sufficiently to arrest declining per capita food availability”.

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