The World Bank Group’s 2013-15 Agriculture for Action Plan
Stop Financing Factory Farming
15th February '23
A Lesson in Privatization, Lack of Oversight and Tired Development Paradigms
Released in January 2013, the World Bank Group 2013-2015 Agricultural Action Plan built on the Bank’s 2008 World Development Report, which reversed decades of institutional disinterest in agriculture.
Ostensibly, the Plan was 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 private sector in institutional lending.
This report – co-authored by campaign member Bank information Center (BIC), Transnational Institute and Food First – outlines the history of the World Bank’s approach, reviews the Action Plan, and offers three case studies of the challenges peasants face in the wake of World Bank Group projects.
The report finds that the World Bank continues to operate from long-held, faulty assumptions regarding both agriculture and development, and calls into question whether the Bank’s strategy will actually improve rural livelihoods, reduce rural poverty, end rural hunger and build climate resiliency.
It is a call for the Bank to scale back the activities of the IFC, scale up the enforcement of safeguards, and truly support small-scale agroecological production.
