IFAD and The World Bank:  A Long-Term - Collaborative Partnership for Agricultural Development

I am delighted to be here today to help mark IFAD's 30 years of fighting rural poverty and hunger. Today the attention of the world’s policy makers is focused on the sub-prime woes, and the financial crises. But the real crisis is that of hunger and malnutrition for most of the two billion people in the world living on less than $2 a day and the almost one billion living on $1 a day or less. Hunger and malnutrition are made worse by the rising world food and fuel prices.  Global food prices have increased substantially (26 percent year-on-year) in the past three years due partly to stepped-up use of food crops for the bio-fuels, high fertilizer prices, low stocks, droughts, and rapid income growth in some developing countries. Food importing countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa are facing a tough time.  This is the real problem that should grab the world's attention.

 We know that 75 percent of the world's poor people are rural and most of them depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. Agriculture is today, more than ever, a fundamental instrument for fighting hunger, malnutrition, and for supporting sustainable development and poverty reduction.  This means that improving agricultural productivity, ensuring  market access, supporting market based and other mechanisms to get food from where it is abundant to where it is needed are all important approaches to help manage rising food prices and help poor people achieve food security so they can hope for a better future for themselves and their  children.

We applaud IFAD, its sister organizations, the World Food Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization here in Rome for the excellent work they are doing on this agenda.

World Bank President, Bob Zoellick, has called hunger and malnutrition part of the forgotten MDGs and is determined to put them at the center of the Bank's work on the poor countries. He strongly believes that to work on this aspect of the MDGs, the World Bank Group must work in close partnership with the Rome based organizations, IFAD, WFP and FAO along with other concerned international organizations, the private sector, foundations and civil society. All of these in turn must work in the closest of collaborative partnerships with the Governments of concerned countries to ensure on the ground impact on this agenda.

Mr. Zoellick has noted that Agriculture is a key pillar of the Bank's strategy for fighting hunger and malnutrition and is, of course, central to fighting poverty and improving a country's economic development and quality of life. Agriculture holds the strongest potential to reduce poverty and stimulate economic growth especially in the world’s poorest countries. Today's world is characterized by rapidly expanding markets, institutional innovation, and revolutions in biotechnology and information technology. Yet, the world still has millions of truly poor people with little or no access to the same markets, expertise and credit. That is the challenge of our time. It is the challenge that must shape our partnerships.

The IFAD-WB partnership is a good example of how we can successfully confront today’s challenges when we work together and I will now focus on that.

• IFAD and the World Bank have collaborated successfully for 30 years. At the global level, for example, we, with the FAO, co-sponsored the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).  This remarkable system of 15 research centers is one of the world’s pioneering organizations, and IFAD’s superb leadership role in its governance is a major reason for its success. 
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•  Our collaboration also extends to a number of thematic areas; for example:
• We collaborate on Poverty and Social Impact Analysis (PSIA) work, Bank staff serving as reviewers of several IFAD country case studies on rural poverty in Africa. These studies are important because they help shed more light on the impact of structural policies on the truly poor and as a consequence contribute to build better partnerships with agricultural communities.
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• On rural finance, we are both members of CABFIN, a donor working group on rural finance. IFAD and the Bank have worked together on the update of IFAD’s rural finance strategy and the update of the "Rural Finance Decision Tools". The more we scale up access to rural finance programs the faster we will reduce poverty.
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• With FAO, we are working on the Gender in Agricultural Livelihoods Sourcebook, which covers 15 sub-sectors and presents a “good practice document” with respect to mainstreaming gender.  IFAD is taking the leadership in the implementation of the land module of the Sourcebook.
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• At the country level, our collaboration is very strong.  Since 1978, we have co-financed 148 projects, 17 in the last five years – including nine in Africa. For example,  the Cameroon National Agricultural Extension And Research Project strengthened producer organizations and improved credit, inputs, marketing services, and access to the agriculture research and extension system. It did this through a network of almost 59,000 contact groups representing over 50 percent of all farm families (up from 15 percent).  As a result, agriculture productivity increased for many of the major crops—for instance maize yields more than doubled, and cassava yields increased fourfold. An additional significant benefit is that about 93 percent of women in the target areas received assistance from the project. 
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Among current projects, the Ethiopia Pastoral Community Development Project seeks to improve the livelihoods of the pastoral groups in the arid and semi-arid Ethiopian lowlands, and the just-approved National Agricultural Technology Project in Bangladesh is designed to improve agricultural productivity and the performance of the national agricultural technology system.

As underlined in the 2008 Agriculture World Development Report (WDR), we need to deepen and broaden our work, and in addition explore new instruments of assistance such as the Catastrophic Insurance Bonds.  In this, IFAD’s role as an innovator and incubator of new ideas will be of the greatest importance. We now need to move forward with the same determination on other global issues including perhaps the most important global challenge facing all of us today -- climate change.

For example, recent studies on climate change show that the poorest countries are the most affected by droughts and consequently suffer the most as a result of decreasing agricultural productivity. It is absolutely crucial to increase agricultural research and focus on high impact mitigation and adaptation actions such as water storage and irrigation, and development of resilient crops, if we are to overcome this problem.

Other global issues we need to address are avian flu, marine fisheries, the global forest partnership, and trade. Working together with other partners we shall find new ways to address these global issues. 

At the institutional level, we need to assist countries to raise the effectiveness and efficiency of their service delivery, of access by the poor to rural markets, credit and technical expertise among others.   

• The WDR stresses the importance of working at these three levels: global, national, and institutional to ensure that the messages in the report are fully translated into actions on the ground.
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The World Bank is proud of our continuing collaboration with IFAD to operationalise these key WDR messages:
(a)  Reduce poverty and stimulate economic growth, especially in Africa;
(b)  Reduce the growing income inequalities between rural and urban areas in more urbanized and middle-income countries; and
(c)  Contribute to environmental sustainability.

We are proud that our strategy and that of IFAD’s based on the 2008 World Development Report on Agriculture are broadly congruent.  Both institutions have been increasing their agriculture sector financing since 2002 with World Bank financing to the sector at just over $3 billion in 2007 and that of IFAD at over $515 million.  This is encouraging in light of the additional resources needed to operationalize the WDR.

Let me say in this context a special thank you to IFAD’s staff and to IFAD’s President, Lennart Bage, who has been such a strong supporter of the WDR and personally participated in many WDR launch events. We also owe President Bage a depth of gratitude for his personal commitment to a strong collaborative relationship between the WBG and IFAD. We wish IFAD the best in its ongoing replenishment exercise.  We urge donors to give IFAD the same warm support the World Bank Group experienced in its recently concluded IDA replenishment.

 Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, let me now end where I began, the challenge of assisting the world’s poor in terms of hunger and malnutrition is now before us. The solution partly embodied in agricultural development is also before us. The partnerships necessary to confront these challenges are recognized. Let us all move forward together as one to meet these challenges on behalf of the world's poor people.

Thank you.

February 13, 2008