Betting on What Works: Agriculture-Led Development

About the session Hundreds of millions of people still live in extreme poverty. At the same time, decades of development experience point to the central role agriculture can play in reducing poverty, creating livelihoods, strengthening food security, and building rural economies. So why do we keep treating agriculture as a collection of projects rather than an engine of economic development? Small-scale farmers are often surrounded by interventions: subsidized inputs, demonstration projects, new technologies, training programs, market-access initiatives, climate adaptation pilots, and temporary injections of donor support. Many produce real benefits. But a harder question comes when the project ends. What has actually been built? Can farmers still access the inputs, finance, knowledge, infrastructure, and markets they need? Can domestic institutions continue delivering the functions previously supported by donors? Has agricultural productivity translated into stronger local economies and greater household resilience? Or does the system wait for another project to arrive? The difference is between supporting farmers and building an agricultural economy. Agriculture-led development asks us to think beyond individual interventions and look at the system around them: extension services, research, input markets, finance, transport, storage, market access, land and water governance, private enterprise, and capable public institutions. None of those pieces works particularly well in isolation. And government cannot be an afterthought. If the goal is durable poverty reduction at national scale, state institutions eventually have to be able to finance, coordinate, regulate, and sustain the systems on which farmers and rural economies depend. That creates a different challenge for international development. How should external capital work with governments rather than around them? Which functions require public investment and which can be built through functioning markets? How do we use subsidy strategically without creating permanent dependency on it? What does it take to move from successful projects to domestic institutions capable of carrying the work forward? And perhaps most importantly: what would we fund differently if the objective were not a successful agricultural program, but a functioning agricultural economy? What to expect A practical conversation about what agriculture-led development looks like when the ambition is durable poverty reduction rather than a succession of projects. Participants will explore the relationship between small-scale farmers, markets, government capacity, public investment, private enterprise, and international development finance. The conversation will examine where targeted interventions are useful, where fragmented programming creates gaps, and what coordinated investment can look like when it is designed around the long-term capacity of domestic institutions. The emphasis will be on moving from intervention to institution: what needs to remain after external funding recedes, who needs to own it, and what it takes to build systems capable of reaching millions of farmers over time. Who this is for This session is for governments, agricultural development organizations, funders and philanthropists, development finance institutions, food-system practitioners, researchers, investors, market-system specialists, and anyone interested in what it takes to move from successful agricultural interventions to broad-based economic development. What you will get out of it A framework for thinking about agriculture as an economic development strategy rather than a collection of individual interventions A clearer understanding of the institutional infrastructure surrounding successful small-scale farming Perspectives on the respective roles of government, markets, donors, and private capital in building agricultural systems that can endure Practical questions for determining when subsidies accelerate system development and when they risk becoming permanent support A sharper way to think about scale: not simply how many farmers a program reaches, but whether the institutions required to keep reaching them exist after the program ends