The Millennium Declaration set 2015 as the target date for halving the number of people living in extreme poverty, but many countries are falling short. Why are some countries doing better than others? This paper seeks to answer this question by looking for shared characteristics of twenty-five developing countries posting extraordinary success in reducing extreme poverty over the past twenty to twenty-five years, compared using indicators of their macro-economic characteristics and, especially, their agricultural economic characteristics. The countries chosen for analysis constitute a highly diverse mix, including some of the poorest and some of the richest developing countries in the world, representing virtually all geographic regions. The countries also differ greatly in their systems of governance and economic management. Yet, they are surprisingly similar in their achievements, not only in reducing poverty, but across the broad range of macroeconomic and agricultural economic performance measures used to compare them.