3. Why has Myanmar’s agricultural sector under-performed?
A series of institutional, policy and structural constraints has hampered agricultural growth and contributed to Myanmar’s current high rates of hunger and malnutrition. The most critical of these problems include: • a highly skewed land distribution, which leaves roughly half of rural households landless, • poor water control systems in the presence of global climate change and increasingly unpredictable rainfall, • a high-cost transportation system, • weak rural financial institutions, • unpredictable and uneven implementation of new government policies, • low public investments in agricultural research, and • weak links between extension services and farmers.