No country has been able to sustain a rapid transition out of poverty without raising productivity in its agricultural sector (if it had one to start—Singapore and Hong Kong are exceptions). The process involves a successful structural transformation in which agriculture, through higher productivity, provides food, labor, and even savings to the process of urbanization and industrialization. A dynamic agriculture raises labor productivity in the rural economy, pulls up wages, and gradually eliminates the worst dimensions of absolute poverty. Somewhat paradoxically, the process also leads to a decline in the relative importance of agriculture to the overall economy, as the industrial and service sectors grow even more rapidly, partly through stimulus from a modern- izing agriculture and migration of rural workers to urban jobs, and partly because of a relative decline in demand for products from the agricultural sector. The purpose of this chapter is to translate the historical lessons from structural transformation into an understanding of the connections between the sectoral composition of economic growth and reductions in poverty, and then to understand the special role of rice in the process. It draws on a long body of work over the past four decades