Agricultural policies and issues: lessons from the 1980s and prospects for the 1990s
Anonymous
FAO Agriculture Series 24: 81-160
1992
Document Number: 379630
This chapter is a further contribution to the debate on an appropriate agricultural and rural development strategy for the 1990s. It attempts to draw lessons from the bitter experience of many countries during the 1980s, a decade often termed as lost to development. Looking back on the 1980s, it reviews the main issues that emerged during the decade and identifies some of the major challenges and opportunities for agriculture in the 1990s. It introduces a broader approach, as it first considers policy change in the light of long-standing debates on the theory of development. The intention is to reach a better understanding of the overall economic and agricultural policies in a longer-term, and possibly less controversial, context than that which often characterizes the debate over structural adjustment packages. The policy changes of the various developing country regions in the 1980s are reviewed. The experience of the 1980s (precisely speaking, crisis and adjustment) may be broadly divided into these regional categories, since geographical proximity usually implies common economic structures and problems. However, care has been taken to avoid excessive generalizations. The regional reviews seek to identify policies that have worked and those that have not, as well as placing them in their own specific context. They also cover the experience of the developed countries. OECD countries are examined with regard to their role in shaping international markets, including those of agricultural products, and the global economic environment. The final regional review outlines the profound changes in economic and agricultural markets and institutions that have taken place in the former centrally planned economies (CPEs) of Eastern Europe since the late 1980s. The difficulties these economies are facing in their transition toward market-oriented systems are also discussed. While the regional reviews analyse the development experiences and region-specific policy issues of the 1980s, the third part of this special chapter focuses on three priority policy areas for the 1990s: poverty, the environment and agricultural trade.