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BOX 5–1
Regional Perspectives on Agricultural Development
Africa
- a drop in per capita food output of about 1 per cent a year since the beginning of the 1970s
- a focus on cash crops and a growing dependence on imported food, fostered by pricing policies and foreign exchange compulsions
- major gaps in infrastructure for research, extension, input supply, and marketing
- degradation of the agricultural resource base due to desertification, droughts, and other processes
- large untapped potential of arable land, irrigation. and fertilizer use
West Asia and North Africa
- improvements in productivity due to better irrigation, the cultivation of 'high-yielding varieties, and higher fertilizer use
- limited arable land and considerable amounts of desert, making food self-sufficiency a challenge
- a need for controlled irrigation to cope with dry conditions
South and East Asia
- increased production and productivity, with some countries registering grain surpluses
- rapid growth in fertilizer use in some countries and extensive development of irrigation
- government commitments to be self-'reliant in food, leading to national research centres, development of high-yielding seeds, and the fostering of location-specific technologies
- little unused land, and extensive, unabated deforestation
- growing numbers of rural landless
Latin America
- declining food imports since 1980. as food production kept pace with population growth over the last decade
- government support in the form of research centres to develop high-yielding seeds and other technologies
- inequitable distribution of land
- deforestation and degradation of the agricultural resource base, fueled partly by foreign trade and debt crisis
- a huge land resource and high productivity potential, though most of the potentially arable land is in the remote, lightly populated Amazon Basin, where perhaps only 20 per cent of the land is Suitable for sustainable agriculture
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