By Raphael Minder in Hong Kong, John Aglionby in Jakarta,,Amy Yee in New Delhi, and Daniel Ten Kate in Bangkok For years, farmers in the remote village of Pallantikang on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi relied on middlemen to sell their produce and found themselves largely isolated from the realities of market demands and price fluctuations. But when 50 of them recently started going directly to retailers, the outcome was a jump of 80 per cent in their earnings from their rice and cassava and 40 per cent from their corn. The hope is that the experience will encourage Pallantikang's farmers to grow more, something that Indonesia badly needs, according to the World Bank, which funded the project. Agricultural production in the country has been declining for two decades. Asian governments have long focused on developing high-growth sectors, such as manufacturing, and meeting the infrastructure requirements of increasingly urban populations. But that has been coupled with a neglect for farming that is now hurting as a larger and more affluent population demands more food, thereby also contributing to surging world prices for staples such as rice and soyabeans. Agricultural spending in the region has often been misdirected as governments seek to avoid social unrest by keeping food prices artificially low, rather than improve productivity or increase acreage. Last year more than 40 per cent of Indonesia's farming expenditure went to subsidies, with seed subsidies alone double the budget for all agricultural research. But "what has happened with food prices since 2007 is a wake-up call", says Ifzal Ali, chief economist of the Asian Development Bank. "The neglect of agriculture in Asia has got to be corrected." Asian governments, he says, have shown chronic complacency towards agriculture since reaping the benefits of the green revolution three decades ago.Then, US research led by Norman Borlaug allowed India and other Asian nations to switch to higher-yielding farming techniques and rapidly gain self-sufficiency in crops such as wheat. A clear example, Mr Ali says, is "the demise of extension services in many Asian countries". While officials from agricultural ministries used to visit rural areas to train farmers and introduce new technologies, "this provision of public service has now almost collapsed". Such neglect is particularly worrying because nearly two-thirds, or 641m, of the world's poor live in the Asia-Pacific region, with rural poor accounting for some 70 per cent of those. In a recent report the United Nations' Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (Unescap) blamed poor farming policies for widening the gap between rich and poor. Annual agricultural labour productivity growth fell to 1 per cent between 2000 and 2002, compared with 2.2 per cent in the 1990s and 2.5 per cent in the 1980s. If the region's average productivity could be raised to Thailand's level, 218m people could be lifted out of poverty, according to the commission. Thailand is ahead of Asian peers on productivity. But it is not immune to the distribution problems and even criminal activities undermining the region's farming. A surge in crop prices is believed to have been accompanied by increasing theft. According to local reports, some Thai farmers have been waking up to find outsiders have harvested their entire crop overnight, using the fact that fields are often far from villages. As governments from Vietnam to India impose new curbs on crop exports, both the ADB and the World Bank are warning that such measures could fuel illegal shipments and black-market trading. Cash transfer schemes could work better, the lenders argue. In the Philippines, the government's monopoly on international rice trading caught the country flat-footed when world prices started to soar. Manila recently had to buy rice from Cambodia at $700 (