Success in Agricultural Transformation What It Means and What Makes It Happen

To lift and keep millions out of poverty requires that smallholder agriculture be productive and profitable in the developing world. Do we know how to make this happen? Researchers and practitioners still debate how best to do so. The prevailing methodology, which claims causality from measures of statistical significance, is inductive and yields contradictory results. In this book, instead of correlations, Isabelle Tsakok looks for patterns common to cases of successful agricultural transformation and then tests them against other cases. She proposes a hypothesis that five sets of conditions are necessary to achieve success. She concludes that government investment in and delivery of public goods and services sustained over decades is essential to maintaining these conditions and thus successfully transform poverty-ridden agricultures. No amount of foreign aid can substitute for such sustained government commitment. The single most important threat to such government commitment is subservience to the rich and powerful minority.

Summary; Introduction; Part I. The Many Faces of Agricultural Transformation in an Industrializing World and What It Means: 1. The industrialized world: success in agricultural transformation in England, Japan, and the United States of America; 2. The developing world: contribution of agriculture in a country's drive for industrialization and improved well-being for all: A. Countries widely recognized as having been high performers; B. Selected developing countries with substantial but uneven progress towards industrial status and broad-based wealth; C. Review of selected quantitative assessments of the contribution of agriculture to overall growth and poverty reduction; D. Success in agricultural transformation - important for overall development? What we learn from this selective review; Part II. Success in Agricultural Transformation: What Makes It Happen?: 3. Success in agricultural transformation: necessary conditions; 4. Success in agricultural transformation: necessary but not sufficient conditions?; 5. Success in agricultural transformation: missing conditions; 6. Success in agricultural transformation: the public foundations of private agriculture; Annexes. A note on the methodology of research of this book: A.1. Introduction; A.2. Proposed approach using cross country data and case studies; A.3. Popper's methodology of science: refutations of bold conjectures; A.4. Seeking refutations as empirical tests of hypotheses not their confirmations: practical considerations.

Sustained government investment in and delivery of public goods and services is required to transform poverty-ridden agricultures into productive and profitable agricultures, well integrated in urbanizing economies. This is the central message of Isabelle Tsakok's extensive review and reassessment of the most influential views on how to 'get agriculture moving'.

Isabelle Tsakok has worked on issues of economic development, particularly for agriculture and rural areas, for more than 25 years, primarily as staff at the World Bank and, since retirement, off and on, as consultant. Her professional activities focus on the policy, institutional and incentive environment for agriculture, agri-business and rural development in open, market-oriented and transition economies. Dr Tsakok's involvement in agricultural policy analysis, program and project formulation and evaluation, and research and training activities has been conducted throughout the developing world, including in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. She is the author of Agricultural Price Policy: A Practitioner's Guide to Partial-Equilibrium Analysis (1990), a manual widely used among development practitioners. Dr Tsakok also developed the policy simulation game EXACTION with Professor Graham Chapman, then at Cambridge University. She received her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.