Agricultural investment needed to halve poverty, says World Bank.

BEIJING, Oct. 20 Kyodo

A report released Friday by the World Bank says more money needs to be pumped into agriculture if the international community is to reach its target of halving global poverty by 2015, including helping 600 million of the very poor who live in Asia.

The annual World Development report says that only about 4 percent of global government spending and international development funds have been spent on agriculture over the past two decades, but three quarters of the world's poor live in rural areas, many of them farmers.

The report says that economic growth focused in the agricultural sector is four times more effective at reducing levels of poverty than growth sustained in other areas of the economy.

Investment in roads, irrigation, rural education, soil improvement and encouraging farmers to produce higher-value products such as poultry and fish are effective ways of developing rural economies, the study says.

Alain de Janvry, one of the report's authors, said, ''Rapidly transforming economies must...focus on new high-value agriculture with fast-growing urban incomes and demand for high-value products in cities becoming the drivers of agricultural growth and poverty reduction.''

Sari Soderstrom, the World Bank's rural sector coordinator in China, said Beijing has made great achievements in helping the rural poor, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty in recent decades.

But she said investment in rural areas needs to be more carefully targeted in the future, and the level of bureaucracy reduced, so that money goes where it is really needed.

''There are maybe about a hundred ministries and organizations involved in this area in China. There is also the problem that the decisions on where money goes are sometimes not driven by the market,'' she said.

The target of halving global poverty by 2015 is one of the eight Millennium Development Goals set by the United Nations in 2000.

Praful Patel, the World Bank's vice president for South Asia, in January urged Japan not to further trim its foreign aid budget so it could continue to help lift millions out of poverty.