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100 CHAPTER 5


ably the more critical step. Indeed, Asia’s own Green Revolution was not pervasive but generally restricted to the region’s traditional breadbaskets, such as the Punjab in India and Pakistan.


What Can Donors and Major Grain Producers Do to Improve Global Food Security?


Bilateral donors and the international institutions they support play a critical role in several aspects of the world food system, including public invest- ments in developing countries; funding of agricultural R&D; and provision of early warning systems, food aid, and humanitarian assistance. Many Western countries and other emerging donors (such as Brazil and China) are also major grain producers. Together these countries have enormous potential to improve the global food system through international resource flows, including knowl- edge dissemination. Given the evidence cited in this monograph on the causes and consequences of the crisis, what major actions should these countries take to improve the global food system?


Perhaps the least controversial goal should be to refocus foreign aid on agriculture. This shift back to agriculture was already taking place before the recent crisis, as donors became increasingly cognizant of the neglect of agri- culture in developing countries and in aid institutions themselves (Bezemer and Headey 2008; World Bank 2008b). Although many donors were already in the process of ramping up agricultural aid, the food crisis undoubtedly re- emphasized the critical and multidimensional role that food production and food prices play in human development, especially in organizations that were debating a withdrawal from agricultural investments (for example, the Asian Development Bank). So the good news is that there is now a wider consensus on the importance of agriculture, backed up by an impressive list of donor commitments to agricultural development (see von Braun 2008b; Abbott and Borot de Battisti 2009; Demeke, Pangrazio, and Maetz 2009). The potentially bad news is that with the financial crisis looming as the next big threat to both donor countries and their recipients, there is a very real concern that the more than US$12 billion in aid commitments to food security and agricul- ture that were made in 2008 will not be kept.


Moreover, donors cannot solve the global imbalance by throwing money at the problem. Aid effectiveness is undoubtedly conditional on the proactive policy efforts of aid recipients. But developing countries vary substantially in how much they emphasize agricultural development and how well they can implement agricultural projects. Even where the political will is strong, weak technical capacity is a real issue because of a history of underinvest- ment and the hasty adoption of structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and 1990s that often left an institutional vacuum in the agricultural sector.


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