This paper has argued that views of African agriculture over the last 130 years have
changed from optimism to pessimism and at least halfway back again. At times it
seems the narratives and their policy implications have been overplayed, pushing policy-
makers towards finding remarkable solutions for extraordinary circumstances,
rather than looking for more incremental, but feasible improvements.
Reviewing the recent performance of African agriculture suggests that neither those
who doubt that any significant changes are taking place, nor those who see progress
in some remarkable but perhaps isolated cases of rapid transformation of farming
and the agricultural supply chains have the evidence to support their positions. To the
frustration of those wanting more reassurance, evidence either in national data or
small-scale studies, is not sufficient to resolve the debates.
Hence policy, to some extent, has to be made on the basis of general principles and
historic lessons, rather than more clearly proven propositions. Policy debates over
African agricultural development may sharply divide on some topics, producing at
times a cacophony of discord, but there is little debate over the importance of basic
conditions for agricultural development of an enabling investment climate and the
provision of rural public goods. It is a reasonable hypothesis – one that unfortunately
is hard to test – that differences in agricultural performance between countries in
Africa may be largely a result of not meeting one or other of these conditions.
Beyond these basics, the great challenge is remedying the failings of markets that
deny most smallholders access to inputs, financial services and insurance. Here opinion
divides between whether progress will best be made through public provision, as
with fertiliser subsidies, or whether private (including NGO and collective) institutional
innovations will be sufficient. In the last few years a profusion of such initiatives
have been started. Some look promising, exciting even, but most have yet to be
evaluated.
If agricultural development is first and foremost about establishing the basic conditions
for growth – and thereby avoiding the elephant traps of gross distortions to markets,
taxation of farmer and under-supply of public goods in rural areas; then most
countries in Africa may be better placed than they have been in the past. Moreover,
some recent initiatives to address the failings of inputs and finance markets look
promising. Given the lessons of success that show African smallholders investing and
innovating when they have the chance, then there are reasons to hope that the modest
growth of production and productivity seen in the last two decades may accelerate still
more in the future — thereby allowing African countries to make the transition from
agrarian to urban economies.