ABSTRACT
Seen from a long historical perspective, agriculture has been a (if not the initial) major development instrument for humanity. The Neolithic period, some 10,000 years ago, saw the birth of agriculture, which supported the fi rst boom in world population. The dominance of Eurasian civilizations over others originated, according to Diamond (1998), in environmental endowments and technological advances supporting diff erentially high rates of productivity growth in agriculture. An agricultural revolution freeing labor from agriculture and providing food for a growing urban population was a precondition to almost every single successful industrial revolution (Bairoch, 1973). The recent accelerated-growth successes in India, China, Vietnam, Brazil, and Chile were importantly derived from the rapid growth of agriculture. Current diffi - culties in industrializing and accelerating growth in many parts of the world, from Sub-Saharan Africa to Yemen and Haiti, are in large part due to failure of these countries to achieve signifi cant gains in productivity in agriculture, what has been called a Green Revolution. Two observations underscore the heavy costs of the failure of agriculture to grow. One is that 75 percent of the 1.2 billion people with incomes of less than a dollar a day are located in rural areas and are dependent for their livelihoods principally on access to land and the performance of agriculture. The other is the periodic return of global food crises that refl ect the recurrent failure of agriculture to deliver enough produce to meet rising eff ective demand and to adjust to new production challenges. Growth failures in agriculture, and what it takes to induce successful agricultural growth, need to be better understood. This is all the more important given that the conditions for successful agricultural growth are both increasingly precarious (with rising land and water scarcity, as well as climate change) and markedly diff erent today than they were in the past, as a consequence of globalization, the emergence of integrated food-value chains, new technological and institutional innovations, and environmental stress. Not only does better use need to be made of agriculture for development, but ways to do this in the current context need to be uncovered, and they will be diff erent from those in the past, and for Africa compared to Asia. This poses a huge and fascinating challenge.
