Executive Summary

Angola has unusual potential to drastically reduce poverty, add to GDP growth, and ensure broad geographic participation in rising incomes. The key to realizing that potential is rapid commercialization of smallholder agriculture, with an initial focus on the Planalto and maize. This paper draws upon a now massive experience in achieving high growth rates in smallholder agriculture. Benefiting from that experience allows much higher growth rates and concurrently more rapid reduction in poverty than achieved in the past. One of the key lessons from the success stories is the specific roles of the private sector, government, and civil society and how deleterious it is when one of these agents steps into roles more properly filled by the others. Although a complex story is charted in this paper and in the executive summary. The main thrusts are: (1) the primacy of the commercial smallholder sector in growth, efficiency, and poverty reduction; (2) the essential role of government in providing large investments in constantly improving physical infrastructure and in agricultural research and fertilizer promotion; (3) the essential role of the private sector in providing critica