The 2008 World Development Report and the political economy of Southeast Asian agriculture

This article seeks to determine what light the literature on the political economy of agriculture in Southeast Asia can shed on the analysis that underpins the World Bank's 2008 World Development Report, Agriculture for Development. It argues that work on Southeast Asia highlights gaps and problems in the Bank's account relating to the dynamics of boom crops, to the nature of social and political mobilisation around agriculture, and to the conceptualisation of agrarian transition.