ABSTRACT

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.

摘要

本文考察了 1960 年至 1990 年间世界银行农业信贷计划的发展。我展示了这些项目如何构成新自由主义发展治理最初被阐明、谈判和争论的关键场所。农业信贷是世行在 1970 年代“反贫困”时代的一个重点。这个时代的农业规划反映了对通过市场化和商业化的农业发展的高度重视，但也非常清楚地表明了围绕信贷在农业市场中的作用的明确矛盾点。农业信贷项目越来越多地包括与利率市场化、国有农业贷款人的商业化、以及更广泛的金融部门进入 1980 年代的市场化。但是，这些通过这些项目将农业信贷市场化和商业化的努力往往反映了普通的运营挑战和意识形态的转变，即使按照他们自己的条件，这些努力本身在很大程度上也失败了。因此，从农业信贷项目的演变来看，新自由主义的立场部分是通过对运营问题的反复试验调整得出的，以及即使在结构调整时代，促进市场化金融体系在实践中也充满了压力。 .