Perspectives on agricultural development policy

摘要

One result of the collapse of the Soviet system has been a decline in the priority of development cooperation (DC). In particular, spending on agricultural development has dwindled to about 6.5 percent of official DC. This is compounded by the factthat the agricultural policies of the industrialized nations continue to lead to distorted world market prices, which have particularly negative impacts on agricultural development in the smaller developing countries. Development policy will not become afocus of political interest again until the issue of the world's food supply becomes a major security problem. The industrialized nations' development policy can quite reasonably be regarded as a product of the Cold War. From the beginning of the Korean War the USA, as the leading western power (according to the Truman Doctrine of March 1947), organized a broadly structured containment policy in respect of the communist dictatorships of the Eurasian continent. It was in the wake of this US-ledcontainment policy that the theoretical and practical impulses emerged for development cooperation between western democracies and the so-called Third World.