CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW

Agricultural Development A Short History of Agricultural Development
Over the past 200 years, nearly every part of the developed world has seen an agricultural transformation. As farming improved, so did incomes, health, and economies. More recently, we’ve seen amazing progress in parts of the developing world. During the Green Revolution, which took place from the 1960s to the 1980s, improvements in staple crops such as maize, wheat, and rice helped double the amount of food produced, saved hundreds of millions of lives, and drove broader development throughout much of Asia and Latin America. There were also some serious unintended consequences—particularly regarding the environment—that left us with important lessons for today. But the efforts demonstrated that large-scale progress against hunger and poverty is possible. Following this period, there was a sense that the problem of inadequate food supply had been tackled. Governments and donors shifted their attention to other concerns. From 1980 to 2004, donor countries cut the percentage of development assistance for agriculture from more than 16 percent to less than four percent. In addition, agriculture accounted for only four percent of public spending in developing countries. The stagnation and decline in agricultural productivity was felt most throughout much of Africa and South Asia. Today, the average farmer in Sub-Saharan Africa gets just over a ton of cereal per acre,