“The latest World Development Report calls for greater investment in agriculture in developing countries and warns that the sector must be placed at the center of the development agenda if the goals of halving extreme poverty and hunger by 2015 are to be realized. Titled ‘Agriculture for Development’, the report says the agricultural and rural sectors have suffered from neglect and underinvestment over the past 20 years. While 75 percent of the world’s poor live in rural areas, a mere 4 percent of official development assistance goes to agriculture in developing countries. In Sub-Saharan Africa, a region heavily reliant on agriculture for overall growth, public spending for farming is also only 4 percent of total government spending and the sector is still taxed at relatively high levels.”