As Prepared for Delivery
Good morning, everyone.
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. How to grow more food—but turn that growth into a business that produces higher incomes for smallholder farmers and more opportunity across entire economies.
Let me start with why.
Over the next 10-15 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.
Our three-pillar strategy reflects that arc—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 percent in the coming decades.
Emerging markets are at the center of both objectives.
The developing world has the ingredients: land, sun, water, and people.
- Africa holds 60 percent of the world’s uncultivated arable land and can boost yields on land already farmed.
- Latin America already produces enough food for well over a billion people, but infrastructure is a challenge.
- Across Asia, smallholder farmers manage most farmland—an enormous base to lift with better technology, finance, and market access.
- Globally, 500 million smallholders produce 80% of the world’s food, yet most remain stuck in subsistence farming—lacking electricity, storage, training, and market access. Fewer than 1 in 10 have access to commercial finance.
The opportunity has been there for decades; what’s changing is our ability to organize at scale to shape the future of food security, nutrition, growth—and employment.
Last year, the World Bank Group began executing a strategy that recognized this reality. We set 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. Steal shamelessly and share seamlessly—that is how we succeed together.
Today, we are looking to push this effort closer to scaled execution.
- The foundation that needs to exist is clear: policy and infrastructure fixes where they matter—land-tenure clarity, seed and sanitary standards, and basics like irrigation, rural roads, storage, and power for cold chain.
- Focus on the small farmer who lacks inputs, credit, advice, or a dependable buyer. Producer organizations, often built by governments, entrepreneurs, or private actors, 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.
- Resilience is embedded at the beginning, not added later: heat-tolerant seeds, soil-matched fertilizers and rejuvenation techniques, efficient irrigation, and strong insurance and financing underpinnings so a bad season doesn’t become a bad year.
- And digital is the glue that holds the system together. Like small AI tools on basic phones that can diagnose crop disease from a photograph, inform fertilizer choices, prompt action ahead of weather events, and move payments securely. The data trail becomes a credit history; better underwriting lowers the cost of capital; lower costs draw in more lenders. That is the virtuous loop we are building.
This isn’t theory. In India’s Uttar Pradesh, I saw all this come together together—the foundation, co-ops, resilience, and digital—and it delivered. Proof of concept: it works, and it scales.
That is the ecosystem we intend to replicate wherever possible. But it only succeeds if government, business, and development partners row in the same direction.
That is what is on display this morning.
Thank you.
[Watch the full event here: AgriConnect: Farms, Firms, and Finance for Jobs]
