Have Agricultural Economists Neglected Poverty Issues? (The Distinguishedl Lecture)

Abstract

In the short term one can be pessimistic about the collective progress of the Third World and its interactions with industrial countries. There is plenty of bad news. With one-quarter of the world's population, industrialized countries consume about 80 percent of the world's goods. With three-quarters of the world's population, developing countries command less than one-quarter of the world's resources. And the imbalance is growing worse.! Of the 2.7 billion people in the tropical and subtropical regions outside of China, 40 percent live in poverty; more than 14 million of their children under 5 years of age starve to death or die of disease each year? Furthermore, at the same time as an increasing proportion of the population of Africa is composed of young people (65 percent of its population is now under age 25), education budgets are being cut - from $ 10.8 billion in 1980 to $ 5.8 billion in 1986.3 In an article assessing the globalization of economies, Richard J. Barnet writes: "Poverty, population pressures, civil war, and repression are turning Sub-Saharan Africa - black Africa minus South Africa and Namibia - into a giant disaster zone, and in countries in South America, such as Colombia and Peru, the civil society is dissolving. In the Philippines more than seventy percent of the population is poor by any human standard. With the end of the Cold War, the increasing marginalization of the Third World appears likely."4 The predictions are ominous. Barnet concludes his article, written before the crisis in Iraq, by speaking to an industrial-country audience: "There is no real north-south dialogue, and politicians in the industrial world feel little pressure to begin one.