Agricultural development in Sub-Saharan Africa

This working paper discusses the conditions of agricultural recovery in Sub-Saharan Africa, against the background of the Asian experience with the Green Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. Apart from its emphasis on modern technology in farming, the Asian “model” can be described as “state driven, market mediated and small farmer based”. The authors argue that, in the African case, there are no serious environmental or technical obstacles towards agricultural intensification. On the contrary, in the recent decades, a number of yield raising crop varieties and technologies have been launched by national and international research organisations operating on the continent. Plausible reasons for the rather poor adoption of such technologies by African smallholders, include the non-agricultural priorities made by African leaders after independence, as well as lack of inclusion of private entrepreneurs and farmer organisation in the development process. Since the 1980s, structural adjustment and global market liberalisation seem to have implied further obstacles to state driven agricultural intensification of the kind seen earlier in Asia. In the face of alarming national food deficits, however, some African governments have resorted to subsidising agricultural inputs for poor strata of the rural population.