tailieunhanh - Agricultural Marketing Companies as Sources of Smallholder Credit in Eastern and Southern africa

Tham khảo sách 'agricultural marketing companies as sources of smallholder credit in eastern and southern africa', tài chính - ngân hàng, ngân hàng - tín dụng phục vụ nhu cầu học tập, nghiên cứu và làm việc hiệu quả | JU IFAD Agricultural Marketing Companies as Sources of Smallholder Credit in Eastern and Southern Africa Experiences Insights and Potential Donor Role Eastern and Southern Africa Division December 2003 This document has a restricted distribution and may be used by recipients only in the performance of their official duties. Its contents may not otherwise be disclosed without the authorisation of the International Fund for Agricultural Development IFAD . Preface The large majority of poor people in Eastern and Southern Africa live in the countryside and most of the poor people in the rural areas generate a major element of their income and food security from small scale agricultural production. In IFAD parlance they are smallholders. Notwithstanding several decades of rural development their incomes and productivity remain very low -and their food security is unstable. This stagnation in the condition of the majority of the rural population has often been attributed - rightly or wrongly - to adoption of the incorrect development model by governments and donors alike. A combination of top-down approaches state management of key economic relations and services and subsidies contributed - or is thought to have contributed -- not to development and income growth but to atrophy and poverty. Structural adjustment - while often not explicitly targeted at rural development models and institutions and certainly not based upon an assessment of alternative possibilities - contributed to the demolition of much of the key policy and institutional infrastructure of rural economic life in the region. The negative accomplishments are tangible. The positive ones less so. Certainly the elimination of distortions has not led quickly to the unfolding of a dense system of new and modern relations and institutions underpinning accelerated development in rural areas. Rather expansion of per capita income and production has been extremely modest where achieved at all and the rural .