The World Bank

Abstract

The World Bank, the oldest and strongest of the multilateral banks, is owned by governments but rooted in the political reality of their unequal voting power. This chapter, a story of the Bank’s assistance to food and agriculture, explains how it adopted an innovation of accessing capital markets using project lending as an instrument to assure accountability of performance to the lenders of capital. In 1960, the Bank established the International Development Association as the concessional window to enable it to lend to poorer countries’ softer sectors, such as agriculture, education, and health. The Bank also developed other tools for allocating capital to countries, establishing norms and standards for other international organizations. This review of the World Bank’s assistance to food and agriculture since the Bank’s inception is a window on how that role and the view of agriculture’s contributions to development have evolved in the context of rapid external changes, such as commodity prices and the debt crisis. The chapter examines how policy analysis and advice are complemented by project assistance. Still the largest lender, its role is smaller now, and questions remain about how the Bank will leverage its considerable heft to address new paradigms of sustainable agriculture and healthy food consumption in the world’s lagging regions, most notably in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.