Tags: Agricultural capital requirements, Crop production, Livestock production, Investment requirements

This paper is an interim report on ongoing work at FAO to estimate investment requirements in developing countries’ agriculture. The estimates presented in the paper are far from final and the narrative of future trends and developments is far from complete. Estimates cover most capital items, without however singling out areas for public involvement, neither of domestic nor of foreign funding sources. Nor has any attempt been made to gauge incremental investment needs required to attain certain development goals such as MDG-1 or the target set by the World Food Summit. This also means that important investment areas such as agricultural research or rural infrastructure are excluded. These will be covered in later work. Likewise, an item of major concern to public investment, namely ‘ensuring access to food for the most needy’ (e.g. through social safety nets) is not dealt with here. Instead, the estimates presented in this paper embody a broad range of capital items needed to achieve the 2030 and 2050 crop and livestock production levels in developing countries as foreseen in the baseline outlook of the latest FAO perspective study (FAO, 2006a). The majority of these capital items relate to primary agriculture. In addition, a number of activities covered relate to downstream industries of primary agriculture, notably various forms of processing, storage and marketing.

Capital-requirements-agriculture.pdf