In the last decade, developing economies in Asia and the Pacific doubled in size, growing by over 7 percent on average. This growth has garnered much attention and plaudits. Yet, 641 million of the world's poorest – nearly two-thirds of the global total – live in the Asia-Pacific region.

Other statistics are equally shocking. Ninety-seven million children remain underweight. Four million children die before reaching the age of 5. About 566 million people living in rural areas have no access to clean water. And less than a third of rural inhabitants have access to basic sanitation.

These fault lines question the sustainability and validity of the current development paradigm, which leaves millions of people trapped in extreme poverty, while so much wealth has been generated in such a short time. Most of the poor are in the rural sector and agriculture is their main livelihood. And this is where the problem lies.

The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) has carried out research which shows that persistent poverty and widening inequality in the region are the result of decades of neglect of agriculture.

The analysis – contained in ESCAP's flagship publication, the Economic and Social Survey of Asia and the Pacific 2008, shows that growth strategies and economic policies in the region have systematically overlooked the agricultural sector. And this is despite the fact that agriculture is the main livelihood of the poor and still provides employment for 60 percent of the working population in Asia and the Pacific.

The tremendous potential of the agricultural sector to reduce poverty has been weakened by unfavorable macroeconomic policies that led to high and variable interest rates and inflation in the 1980s as well as the erosion of public services such as agricultural extension services since the 1980s, the failure of agricultural credit policies and the massive scaling down of public investment in irrigation and rural infrastructure. The list goes on.

Official development assistance (ODA) has shown a similar disregard for the sector. Between 1983-1987 and 1998-2000, ODA for agriculture fell by 57 percent to an annual average of $5.1 billion. Lending for agriculture by multilateral agencies, such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, also showed a downward trend.

As a result, growth and productivity in agriculture have stalled. Alongside this, the decline in poverty has been slowing down in the region since the late 1980s. Our analysis also shows that the role of agriculture in creating jobs is diminishing in some sub-regions. In East Asia, South-East Asia and the Pacific, agriculture generates fewer new jobs these days.