4.4. Key Decisions Going Forward
Our team strongly advocates a strategy focused on the Long Game, particularly a set of early
actions necessary for enabling necessary structural reforms, but complemented by Short Game
interventions that help to increase incomes, assets, farmer skills and water management systems
that expand productive potential in the Long Game. By piloting models for effective bottom-up research and extension, actions in a Short Game can help to set up a successful Long Game. A balanced attack, centered on the Long Game but complemented by Short Game interventions, will likewise help to demonstrate to rural communities that the GOM and its development partners are seriously committed to improving the agriculture sector. This multi-pronged approach addresses the needs of rural communities for early visible change while at the same time remaining committed to necessary structural re-engineering of institutions and policies.Myanmar’s neighbors and competitors in Thailand, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Malaysia, India and
China have all committed to a Long Game involving strong public investments in agricultural
research, extension and in the public goods required to support agricultural productivity growth,
especially among small farmers. Without similar commitment in Myanmar, we find it difficult to see how the country’s farmers will be able to compete in increasingly competitive regional and global markets – including those at home.
Policy reforms begun in Myanmar at the end of the 1980s have moved in this direction, though slowly and at sometimes variable speeds. Continued reforms, coupled with increased resource allocations for agriculture and improved policy implementation capacity will be required to translate these still-unfolding policy changes into sustained, improved conditions on the farm. Promulgating new laws -- as difficult as that appears -- is often the easiest part of a reform process. Mobilizing the political will to increase budget resources, in the presence of many competing constituencies, frequently proves more difficult, as does institutional restructuring, which by definition alters the power base of many vested interests. Myanmar has reached the stage in its agricultural reform process where substantial resource increases and significant institutional restructuring are required to advance an effective reform agenda. Because two-thirds of Myanmar’s population and three-fourths of its poor live and work in rural areas, broad-based agricultural growth offers a uniquely powerful instrument for accelerating economic growth and improving the welfare and food security of vulnerable households. Myanmar’s current highly skewed distribution of land, its growing levels of landlessness and increasingly contentious disputes over land access not only pose dangers to vulnerable household welfare but also risk inflaming social tensions and conflict. As a result, we consider the Long Game reforms outlined here imperative for agricultural productivity growth and poverty reduction, as well as long-term political stability.