African agriculture and the World Bank: development or impoverishment?

The World Bank has played a prominent role in shaping agricultural policy in Africa. This article asserts that this role has often been highly destructive, both in regards to African agriculture and food production.

Under structural adjustment conditionality of the 1980s, the World Bank’s prescriptions became largely mandatory for the debt-ridden national economies of the African continent. Its influence over a country’s policies, the authors assert, is now generally in direct inverse proportion to that country’s economic strength. Most African countries have to greater or lesser degrees espoused and implemented World Bank development policy for the last 25 years. African agricultural sectors are seen to demonstrate, through continuous low growth rates and deepening rural poverty, the impact of World Bank policies.

The authors argue that the World Bank's agricultural policies have displayed contradictory tendencies and a glaring discrepancy between stated objectives and actual outcomes. Despite this, the World Bank has rarely been held to account. Peasant farmers have been too dispersed and without a voice whereas heavily indebted African governments are too dependent on the World Bank’s conditional aid to criticise the policies it enforces.