[Report] The World Bank Group’s 2013-15 Agriculture for Action Plan: A Lesson in Privatization, Lack of Oversight and Tired Development Paradigms

Released in January 2013, the World Bank Group 2013-2015 Agricultural Action Plan provides an accurate reflection of the Bank’s 2008 World Development Report that reversed decades of institutional disinterest in agriculture. Ostensibly, the Plan is designed to improve rural livelihoods and support global food security by addressing climate change, rural gender inequality, market access and investment needs for agriculture; and also prepare the institutional ground for the market-led development of agriculture and a dominant role for the privatesector in institutional lending.

In this report, by Stop Financing Factory Farming founding member Bank Information Center (BIC), outline the history of the World Bank’s approach, review and discuss the Action Plan, and then offer three case studies and examples of the challenges peasants face in the wake of World Bank Group projects.

BIC questions whether the Bank’s strategy will actually improve rural livelihoods, reduce rural poverty, end rural hunger and build climate resiliency, and find that the World Bank continues to operate from long-held, faulty assumptions regarding both agriculture and development.

It is a call on the Bank to scale back the activities of the IFC, scale up the enforcement of safeguards and truly
support small-scale agroecological production.