World Bank sees farming as key to unleashing income growth at scale

October 16, 2025 in Finance, Investment, Land & Agriculture, Policy by Editor

Banga said agriculture has always been central to development, but today, the challenge is to make it a driver of jobs, income, and food security at scale. He was speaking at the AgriConnect forum in Washington.

Globally, 500 million smallholder farmers produce 80 pc of the world’s food, yet most remain stuck in subsistence farming, lacking electricity, storage, training, and market access while fewer than one in 10 have access to commercial finance.

Ajay Banga, the President of the World Bank Group was speaking this week at the AgriConnect event, part of the 2025 World Bank and IMF Annual Meetings in Washington.

“Agriculture has always been central to development, but today the challenge is to make it a driver of jobs, income, and food security at scale. The question is how to grow more food, and also turn that growth into a business that produces higher incomes for smallholder farmers and more opportunity across entire economies,” he said.

AgriConnect is a World Bank Group initiative to transform smallholder farming, create jobs, and strengthen global food security. In the case of Africa, the continent holds 60 pc of the world’s uncultivated arable land and can boost yields on land already farmed.

Banga said over the next 10 to15 years, about 1.2 billion young people in developing countries will come of age, but current trends suggest only 400 million jobs will be created. That delta—hundreds of millions—will either power the global economy or spill over into unrest and migration.

“That is why the World Bank Group has made job creation our central mission. Most jobs ultimately come from the private sector, but they don’t all start there. Countries move along a continuum: early on, the public sector drives job creation; over time, private capital and entrepreneurship take the lead,” he said.

Banga said a three-pillar has been developed namely, to build infrastructure and skills; create predictable regulations and a business-friendly environment; and back investors with risk tools that crowd in capital.

“Where do these jobs come from? We see potential in five sectors: infrastructure, agribusiness, healthcare, tourism, and value-added manufacturing. Today, we’ll focus on agribusiness—central both to jobs and to meeting global food demand that is projected to rise more than 50 pc in the coming decades,” he said.

Banga said the opportunity has been there for decades, but what is changing is the ability to organize at scale to shape the future of food security, nutrition, growth—and employment.

He said in 2024,  the World Bank Group began executing a strategy that recognized this reality by setting out to help smallholders raise productivity and scale; connect them to structured value chains that lift incomes and guard against exploitation so farmers aren’t forced to sell land for lack of credit, insurance, or market access.

“At the same time, we’ve set a target to double our agribusiness commitments to $9 billion annually by 2030—aiming to mobilize an additional $5 billion. It is grounded in what we’ve tested in the field and in lessons borrowed from others,” he said.

There will be a focus on the small farmer who lacks inputs, credit, advice, or a dependable buyer. Other focus areas are the producer organizations, often built by governments, entrepreneurs, or private actors, who can connect them to suppliers, insurers, buyers, and lenders.

“That gets advice, fertilizer, and working capital to the field and creates predictable routes to market. Once productivity and scale improve, cooperatives sell into structured offtake with SMEs or larger firms. Farmers capture more value, lenders see predictable cash flows, and incomes rise,” Banga said.