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Consolidation and Accelerated Development of African Agriculture: What Agenda for Action?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Reginald Herbold Green
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Extract

… Fragments of our lost kingdom …

Here the stone images

Are raised, here they receive

The supplication of a deadman's hand

Under the twinkle of a fading star.

—T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

There is an extraordinary degree of similarity throughout the region in the nature of the policy problems that have arisen and in the national response to them.

— Accelerated Development, p. 4

We asked for bread

And they chucked a stone at us.

— A senior African economic analyst's observations on Accelerated Development.

Economic growth implies using … scarce resources more efficiently…. Policy making inevitably has to embody wider political constraints and objectives…. The record of poor growth … suggests that inadequate attention has been given to policies to increase the efficiency of resource use and that action to correct this situation is urgently called for.

— Accelerated Development, p. 24

People … must be able to control their own activities within the framework of their communities. At present the best-intentioned governments—my own included—too readily move from a conviction of the need for rural development into acting as if the people had no ideas of their own. This is quite wrong … people do know what their basic needs are. If they have sufficient freedom they can be relied upon to determine their own priorities for development.

— President J. K. Nyere

Our own reality—however fine and attractive the reality of others may be—can only be transformed by detailed knowledge of it, by our own efforts by our own sacrifices.

— Amilcar Cabral

Type
Research Article
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , December 1984 , pp. 17 - 34
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1984

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References

Notes

1. For Kenya alone, Livingstone (forthcoming) estimates a migration of 200,000 to unsuitable lands over the 1970s. In the Sahel, despite (or because of?) the efforts of the Club du Sahel to reduce long-term vulnerability to drought, the ecologically-suicidal moves have been even larger.

2. Oddly, the technical assistance personnel supplied by the Bank introduced this approach in Tanzania in 1981. It has the result that, for maize, there is a positive correlation between distance from a main market and a farmgate price!

3. For Tanzania there are 1970–80 agricultural growth series ranging from 1.5% to 3.5% a year. The Bank uses 1.5% in its report. The most detailed study (an FAO study in nutrition) suggests 2.5–3.0%, and an average calorie level of 2350–2500 for 1978–79, or well above the total requirements vs. the official FAO back-of-envelope 2060-odd (10% below). See also Lipton, 1983.

4. Compare Wallace (1980) and Bank (1981: 53) on World Bank projects in Northern Nigeria; and Green (1982) and World Bank (1981: 45) on external causes of crises and market and public sector weaknesses.

5. With the partial exception of the price distortion “index” in World Development Report (1983), the indices unfortunately rest on subjective judgments as to degree of distortion. At least two low-distortion cases—Kenya and Malawi—seem to be grossly understated. Scatter around the “trend” line is still high. Ironically, in “Brazil” flexibility and pragmatism in managing industrialization, an approach to creating a major industrial sector relying on maximum price distortion for that sector, is lauded, as it was in the World Development Report of 1982.

6. See Livingstone (forthcoming). The Bank has, in fact, reversed its views on Malawaian policy.

7. In Tanzania there is no evidence that villagization has had any macro effect on agricultural growth to date. The period cited, 1973–74, was before moves and was affected by weather; 1975–78 was after moves, but its record four-year agricultural growth related to an unprecedented four good weather years in a row, while 1979–83 has seen a similarly unprecedented run of droughts and/or “split” rains in most of the country, particularly North and Lake. However, relative price shifts seem to have triggered the collapse of cashew production over 1975–80. Per contra, radical real price increases since have not caused a reversal, so even there a doubt persists.

8. The Bank has since resiled from the apparent negativism on food self-sufficiency and re-estimated terms of trade projections.

9. See Gasper et al. (1982), Allison and Green (1983: 9), and Allison in Ndegwa (forthcoming), for fuller arguments on these points.

10. Here the Bank tended to evaluate the prospects of each country's existing primary exports as poor and to advise diversification into those of other countries. While a sensible strategy for one or two countries, if nobody else acted in the same way, the overall results could only be counterproductive.

11. Apparently the Bank expects (hopes?) that not more than a third to a half of its members in the Sub-Sahara will produce SAP's it considers acceptable, and that by radically reducing loans and credits to the others below present levels, it can get by. The problem is not Bank money, but IDA.

12. See Tunisia (1983). On the face of it the Ivory Coast already has a true (including short-term and commercial arrears) debt service/export ratio over 40% and rising and a decline in earned import capacity, with exports almost stagnant since 1979 in quantity terms.

13. For a detailed challenge see Colclough in Allison and Green (1983) as well as Ndegwa et al. (forthcoming).

14. Tanzania illustrates both of these apparently cross-canceling criticisms, but it is hardly unique.

15. It is not clear how good a proxy for changes in peasant (farmgate) prices this is; most food is marketed through small, opaque private channels. Of course, if they are raising their share of final price, this suggests that, so far as the peasant goes, they are much of a muchness with the less efficient public marketing authorities.

16. Uganda illustrates the ambiguities of necessity here. Its 97.5% devaluations have reduced the grower share in coffee export proceeds, and bolstered coffee surplus extraction as the main public sector source of revenue. This, within a SAP-IMF package, seems a trifle outre. But it is hard to see how Uganda could otherwise have raised revenue domestically. Its neighbors new-found (with export quota imposition) interest in helping deter “transit” smuggled coffee has made it consistent with almost maintaining (more precisely, recovering to near) early 1980 levels of official coffee exports.

17. Livingstone (1983) argues this for both Kenya and Tanzania. Ochieng's data (Ndegwa et al., forthcoming) strongly suggest the same for Uganda.

18. Tanzania (1983–84), based on ILO (1982). Showing near equality in 1981 and subsequent wage, COL, and grower price evolution. Consuming power treats household provisioning (food, shelter) goods at urban retail prices.

19. They also constitute the bulk of the domestic manufacturing sector and, often, a major portion of the tax base. Restoring levels of production and of rural availability is central to raising incentives and reducing fiscal imbalance. Thus their under-emphasis in many (not all) Bank SAP and Program Loans is a serious failure to grasp a critical agriculture/industry linkage.

20. The report (pp. 64–69) seems in accord, but there is a clear non-empirical bias against public enterprises. On records the author has seen in twenty-four years in Africa, co-ops might be a better candidate for resource waste/cost maximization, but there are notable exceptions.

21. In the Kigoma Integrated Rural Development Project, technical experts “knew” the peasants “should” grow cotton. Anyone with some knowledge of the history of cotton in Tanzania could have warned that they would almost certainly not do so, even though why this is so was unclear. The experts then intervened in a Tanzanian debate (one school of thought saw no reason why the peasants should not grow food to eat and sell if they saw that as preferable to cotton) to have “enforced” cotton cultivation and input distribution. Extension personnel were made suspect (not that, luckily, it actually forced much cotton growing) and a debt burden created: phony to the peasants but not to the Rural Development Bank, which financed the inputs. As a result, when extension advice is needed, it is not sought; and when credit is needed, TRDB is unwilling to extend it because of arrears on the unwanted cotton inputs.

22. The desire to have a system which is simple and tidy on an organization chart may be part of the problem. Centralized extension in a decentralized administration and rural development context seems unlikely to be sound, though centralized training and research appear critical. Similarly, specialists may be needed for some crops, but for mixed-crop areas the bulk of the work must be done by generalists to achieve plausible frequency of peasant/extension officer contact.

23. See World Bank (1981, 1982, 1983). Chapter 6 of Accelerated Development, which is evidently by another hand than the main policy chapters, appears to conflict with them on the weight to be accorded to health/education/water.

24. In all fairness, there must be grave doubt that the Bank—or the committee producing the final version of the report—ever analyzed the distributional aspects or would have been at all happy with their probable total impact if they had.

25. This is of course a general, normative criticism of all “turnpike” and Mahalonobis models, pushed to their internally logical, long-term growth maximization conclusions.

26. Livingstone (1983) argues convincingly that downwardly manipulated wages and peasant prices in Malawi have artificially depressed effective demand and substantially hampered industrial development. The evidence he adduces would seem to apply pari passu to marketed food.

27. See Gaspar et al. (1982) for a much fuller exposition of some of the issues and relationships involved.

28. One may well—especially in retrospect—query the wisdom of starting on this route and the sanity of persisting in it. However, the point at present is how ready even the most nationalist and self-confident of African states have been to allow massive external policy and programming power in agriculture.

29. The Bank in the mid- and late 1970s was, in some cases, an honorable exception (as IF AD is now). Indeed, in two of its integrated rural development projects in Tanzania (Mwanza and Kigoma), the infrastructure and basic services components were outstanding successes, while agricultural output increases were either in totally undesigned crops (Kigoma food and coffee, Mwanza cassava), or very low (Mwanza). On examining the original project design, the reason for the latter is clear: there were next to no tested, viable, significant output packages in either case and the main targeted crops in Kigoma were less rewarding to peasant growers than maize and beans, once they had transport and buyer access for the latter.

30. Chapter 9 is critical of this—again without noting the key role of external agencies, not least the Bank, in causing and sustaining it.

31. Where apparent data bases exist, closer study often reveals they are built on this air, e.g., in Tanzania in the late 1970s, MDB produced a detailed costing of coffee at Sh.16 per kilogram (labor time at Sh.20 per day) which was widely believed. In 1981/82 a large Tanzanian grower (probably among the key sources of the cost data) said that at Sh.10 per kilo and Sh.30 per day for labor he made a profit of 33% of sales, implying a cost of Sh.6.67 with up to 50% cost increases since the supposedly definitive Sh.16 figure!

32. Until 1979, the government believed maize/sembe was at breakeven, an impression which a reading of summary sections of MDB reports did little to dispel. In fact, a 50% subsidy was being covered by hidden (MDB had ceased to have accounts in any meaningful sense) de facto commercial bank subsidies which reached $200 million before they were hotted in 1980/81.

33. For a fuller, and in many ways even more harshly critical, review of MDB and associated agricultural sector “aid” to Tanzania, see Payer (1983).

34. For a fuller presentation of the author's views, see Carlsson (1983); for an African perspective, see “Synthesis and Synopsis” in Ndegwa et al. (1983).

35. An open preference—for, e.g., universal primary literacy—which is partly normative but with a supporting productionist case is not a problem; it is concealed ideological preferences masquerading as empirical truth that are harmful.

36. The long here may be frighteningly distant. If over 1978–83 physical output has stagnated, population risen 15–17.5%, and terms of trade losses risen to 15% of 1978 “national purchasing power,” then as 1984 opens per capita command over real resources is 32.5–35.0% below 1978. This is not atypical of many SSA economies. Assuming an average rate of output growth of 6% (vs. World Bank 1983 projection of 3.3% on average), 3% population growth, no further worsening of the terms of trade, it would be past 1990 before 1978 levels were fully recovered.

37. ECA (1983: para. 116). The Bank would now agree with this despite Accelerated Development's call for “external” orientation—perhaps because in its 1985–1995 SSA projection the main reason for a very low growth ceiling is a balance of payments constraint flowing from a 1.7 incremental imports/incremental GDP ratio which is far higher than for any other region.

38. This is at macro level—it does not mean labor intensive ammonia-urea plants any more than 10,000-hectare mechanized farms leaving 90% of the rural labor force marginalized.

39. For a more detailed presentation, see Green in Carlsson (1983).