Poverty Orientated Agricultural and Rural Development

Over the last twenty years the proportion of development cooperation resources earmarked for agricultural development has dwindled to between six and seven per cent of total bi- and multilateral Official Development Assistance. This is despite the fact that eighty per cent of the world's poor live in rural agricultural areas and that the poor are disproportionately affected when political, military and natural events lead to regional or global food shortages.

Brandt and Otzen's key book fills a gap in current literature, undertaking a wide-ranging conceptual reorientation of development cooperation, criticizing the current orthodoxy and its bias towards urban areas, and arguing that in order to effectively alleviate poverty across the world, agricultural and rural development measures need to be implemented both by central and subnational governments, aid agencies and the private sector. The authors investigate the world food question, the current pressures it is under and its link to rural poverty, and set out the policies that need to be undertaken to reduce global poverty.

Hartmut Brandt began his professional education with three years of farming practice (1960-62) and continued with eight years of academic study and research in agricultural sciences and economics at Kiel University, Technical University of Berlin and Makerere University College, Kampala. Thereafter, followed thirty-two years of applied research, consulting work and postgraduate training based at the German Development Institute (GDI). Dr Brandt retired in 2002 but continues his consultative activities.

Uwe Otzen is senior research fellow at the German Development Institute (GDI). He studied international agricultural science at the Technical University of Berlin, where he obtained his PhD in 1973. He worked four years in Malawi as agricultural consultant and project manager for a regional development project of the GTZ, the German Agency for Technical Cooperation, before he joined the German Development Institute in 1977, where he worked as research fellow in the Africa Department. Between 1982 and 1986 he spent four years in Zimbabwe as agricultural and rural development advisor to the Ministry of Lands, Resettlement and Rural Development in Harare.