Increasing Food Production in Sub-Saharan Africa: Comment

The useful review by Matlon and Spencer of the poor performance of agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa questions the primacy of emphasis that policy and institutional factors have recently received as obstacles to sustained agricultural development in African countries. The authors are certainly right to ask whether there really are surplus resources (particularly land) and on-shelf technologies that can be applied to African agriculture. But in so doing, they unfortunately take an unfounded view of expectations raised in this regard in one of the two reports they criticize (see below). At the same time, they fail to focus on what is the primary requirement for breaking the long-standing stagnation of African agriculture-the application of resources to production in much more effective ways and (expect possibly for total land) on a much larger scale than in the past. Policy reforms, in and of themselves, are not going to do the job. Without resources to back them up, policies, no matter how enlightened, are simply empty words on the pattern that has become all too familiar to observers of African agriculture. To be sure, the tendency to tax the agricultural sector through artificial price structures, to overvalue currencies so as to make imported goods cheaper, and to favor urban consumers through subsidized staple food prices is changing throughout Africa. The counterproductive nature of the contribution of such measures to the present food crisis is evident now, even if it was not before. The crisis is so deepseated, however, that merely changing policies will not suffice to allow these countries to solve their debt problems, to reverse disadvantageous terms of trade in a way that generates needed foreign exchange, to raise income levels in the rural sector so as to stem rural outmigration, to improve marketing efficiency through repair of rural transportation infrastructure, and above all to raise the productivity of land and labor in the agricultural sector so as to provide needed cheap food for urban populations. It should be clear by now that the old exportoriented system of economic management in these countries, which often consisted of extracting wealth from the agricultural sector to finance the economy while in fact relegating this sector to a low-level autarky, has failed to lead to economic development (a trend described as early as the 1960s in the writings of Ren6 Dumont). Several reasons can be advanced. First, world markets for such exports have not behaved in a way favorable to African producers, which have lost market shares to other regions in the past two decades and have failed to maintain productivity levels for tree crops and irrigated cash crops. Second, resources generated by agricultural exports were funneled off initially into nonproductive uses in urban sectors and more recently into debt service payments. Third, profit margins redounding to governments from export crops have been squeezed by rapidly rising costs of production, particularly costs of fuel, fertilizer, and labor (pushed upwards in part by high urban wage rates). As a result, import bills for food to meet the widening gap between domestic food production and consumption (mitigated only slightly by concessional sales and food aid) now absorb an increasing share of stagnant or shrinking foreign exchange earnings. In Sudan, a major cotton exporter, although there were warnings of the coming economic crisis as early as 1979, it was not until 1983 that the magnitude of external debt was discovered. The