The Importance of Agriculture in Developing Countries

Agriculture always plays an essential role in the economy of every country. Not only because of it tends to provide foods for the entire population of a country but agriculture helps to connects and interacts with all the related industries of that country. A country is usually believed to be a social, political and economically stable nation if the agricultural sector is very stable. However, people in developing countries who are depend on agriculture for their living are always much poorer than those who work in other sectors of the economy. And generally those who involve in agriculture sector are always represents a significant share of the total number of poor people in the countries where they live. Hence, there is a need to improve agriculture industry.

It is important to improve agriculture sector because it create job opportunities for its citizens. Agriculture is known as the backbone of the developing countries. It accounts for between 30 to 60 percent of the total GDP and employs about 70 percent of the total workers. Apparently, this are a huge amount of peoples involves in agriculture industry if compared to any other sectors in developing countries. In other words, agricultural sector is the major source of employment in most of the developing countries. This is because the owner of the farm usually found that it is necessary to hire additional hands for the purpose to cultivate the lands successfully and to look after the livestock. However, the increase of job opportunities is not only on farms but also in processing, advertising and packaging the agriculture product. Thus, if the agriculture sector is improving, it will definitely benefit the developing countries by decreasing its unemployment rate.

Not only that, agriculture sector helps to fully utilize the unused land in developing countries. The expansion of agriculture output caused abundant supply of unused land to be brought under cultivation. However, in most of the African countries such as Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia, there are only 12 percent of arable land is actually been cultivated. The African Union (AU) has appealed to the governments to allocate 10 percent of their total spending to agriculture, but unfortunately only four or five countries have successfully reach that target. Obviously, developing countries do not have enough money to develop the unused land. It is a waste for just leave a huge area of arable land empty without any plantation. Thus, the offer by foreign investors to develop agricultural land is very attractive to developing countries.

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Based on the standard of the “one-dollar-a-day threshold”, there are 1.2 billion poor people in developing countries. And among these peoples, there are 780 million of them facing chronic hunger, which means that their daily intake of calories is not enough for them to live healthy and productive lives. Besides, there are millions more suffer from specific nutritional insufficiency of one form or another. Most of the world’s hungry live in countries which are categorized as low-income and food-deficit nation. They are located mainly in the developing world and more than half of them are in Africa. These countries do not produce enough food to meet the demand of the citizens and they may not have enough foreign exchange to replace the shortfall by purchasing foods on the international market. This kind of situation getting serious especially when they are facing with loss of crops and livestock that caused by natural disaster or extremely high food prices on the international market. In order to feed people better, agriculture must strengthen its conservation goals by adding assortment to the food chain and by restoring the ecosystems.

Agriculture sector can reduce hunger as it ensures the food security of developing countries. The drive toward food security has seems to be slowed in recent years. The growth rate of agricultural production is declining, the world grain reserves have shrink to record lows, the commitments of aid to agricultural development have decreased as well and thus it boosting the demand for imported grain. This obviously opposed to the current situation of developing countries because their population is expanding. Food production is directly related to the daily life of human being. Food security is an immediate and future main concern for all developing countries. A stable agricultural industry plays an important role to ensure the food security of a country. Food security is considered as one of the basic requirements of any nation. None of the nation that consists of huge amount of hungry people can grow efficiently with a stable agricultural base because hungry people can do nothing towards helping to develop their country. Food security prevents starvation which often been considered as one of the serious problems that being faced by the small developing countries.

Furthermore, agriculture also ensures economic growth of developing countries. Agriculture is a fundamental source of income for developing nation that exists on this globe. Not only because of it provides food for our daily life, but mostly all the industries in the country depend on agriculture both directly and indirectly. The high rates of economic growth are basically linked with the rapid expansion of agricultural output. In fact, the economy of several West African countries is primarily maintained by agriculture sector. Most of them depend on agriculture for their export trade to boost the incomes of the country. Agricultural products are their main foreign exchange earner which contributes about 75 percent of their total export commodities. The exports of agriculture products create additional economic activity that ripples through the domestic economy. Besides, agriculture contributes between 40 to 60 percent of the total GDP of most of the African countries.

In conclusion, it is crucial to develop the agriculture sector not only in the developing countries but every country in the globe. A very low GDP and widespread chronic under nutrition are generally because of the underdeveloped of agriculture sector. Citizens cannot get enough their basic needs for their daily life. Therefore, economic progress in the agricultural industry is very important to boosting the incomes and increasing food supplies of the poor. Agricultural sector can only be further develop if and only if everyone in the society willing to take the responsibility to sustain a society that have sufficient food supply for our future generation. This is an issue that related to the whole society and efficient action must to be taken from now on.