The World Bank, Agricultural Credit, and the Rise of Neoliberalism in Global Development

This article examines the development of the World Bank’s agricultural credit programming between 1960 and 1990. I show how these projects constituted key sites where neoliberal development governance was initially articulated, negotiated, and contested. Agricultural credit was a key point of emphasis for the Bank during its ‘Assault on Poverty’ era in the 1970s. Agricultural programming in this era reflected a strong emphasis on agricultural development through marketisation and commercialisation, yet also very clearly demonstrated clear points of ambivalence around the role of credit in relation to agricultural markets. Agricultural credit projects increasingly included implicit or explicit conditionalities linked to the marketisation of interest rates, the commercialisation of state-owned agricultural lenders, and the marketisation of wider financial sectors into the 1980s. But these efforts to marketize and commercialise agricultural credit through these projects often reflected mundane operational challenges as much as ideological shifts, and themselves largely failed even on their own terms. Looking at the evolution of agricultural credit projects thus shows how broadly neoliberal positions were arrived at in part through trial and error adjustments to operational concerns, as well as how fraught the promotion of market-based financial systems was in practice even in the structural adjustment era.