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IF East
Asia and the Pacific countries like the Philippines are
to successfully achieve the Millennium Development Goal
(MDG) of halving poverty and the number of hungry
people, these countries must be prepared to spend no
less than $2.52 billion collectively for agriculture
every year until 2015.
A
simulation done by the International Food Policy
Research Institute (Ifpri) indicated $2.52 billion was
the baseline scenario; a very high investment scenario
would require spending about double, or $4.42 billion, a
year.
“Investing in agriculture is key to reducing poverty and
hunger in developing countries and is an essential
element in addressing the current food-price crisis,”
said the Ifpri policy brief titled “Investing in
Agriculture to Overcome the World Food Crisis and Reduce
Poverty and Hunger,” by Shenggen Fan and Mark Rosegrant.
The
Ifpri said that while numerous studies have been made to
estimate the costs involved in achieving MDG 1, there
are no studies on agricultural-growth requirements or on
the quantities of public resources needed to support
agricultural growth.
So it
calculated the incremental public-investment
requirements of changes in key drivers affecting
agricultural growth using a unit-cost approach, under a
baseline scenario versus an MDG-focused scenario.
The
baseline scenario showed the region must spend $210
million for agricultural research, $510 million for
rural roads and $1.8 billion for irrigation annually.
In
contrast, a very high investment scenario would mean
that the region must spend $3.18 billion for
agricultural research, $430 million in rural roads and
$810 million in irrigation every year. Furthermore,
incremental spending needed to achieve the MDG 1 was
also calculated separately and the institute found that
for the region, the needed incremental spending has to
be around $1.9 billion.
In
addition, in order to achieve MDG 1, the Ifpri said it
would help to invest in complementary services, such as
secondary female education and access to clean water.
Ifpri
said the required growth and financial resources,
however, vary based on past progress in poverty
reduction and the role of agriculture in the overall
economy. The analysis only addressed some of the gaps by
simulating the required total and incremental
agricultural spending, using two different approaches.
The
institute also said that these estimates did not include
the health and nutrition spending needed to address MDG
1 in a comprehensive manner. |
