Chatham House: Green Revolutions for Sub-Saharan Africa?
Briefing Paper – Read here
Diana Hunt and Michael Lipton, January 2011
- In most of sub-Saharan Africa, faster growth in agriculture is a precondition for sustainable economic growth and poverty reduction. This will require technical progress tailored to Africa’s varied agro-ecologies, notably improved seeds, more fertilizer and water management. Models of how to do this are available from Asia’s Green Revolution and from some recent African success stories.
- Africa is short of capital and increasingly land-scarce. It also has many underemployed poor people. Asian experience shows that in such conditions employment-intensive, small-scale farming is usually both more efficient and more pro-poor than available alternatives.
- Current foreign land acquisitions in Africa will serve its interests only if they underpin the development of scientific, labour-absorbing and usually small-scale farming. In some former ‘settler economies’, progress will require careful land reform.
- Other requirements are improvements in infrastructure and institutions – transport, marketing facilities, credit and insurance – tailored to the needs of small- and medium-scale farming. Markets and states need one another.
- Recent progress – through increased shares of public resources devoted to agriculture, donor pledges, some improved output trends and better access for sub-Saharan farm products to world markets – is real but overstated; much more needs to be done.
Also read:
Green Revolutions for Africa?
Programme Paper
Diana Hunt, January 2011
and… the RAS Annual Lecture with Kofi Annan: Africa and the world food security system
The crisis in Africa even prior to the whole world financial crisis, was and still is to the point where “there cannot be worse” than what we got… Indeed I would be more than excited to see the “good policies” you are referring to as the ones our african nations are sticking with… One the contrary I would rather say that this whole crisis sill reeling should be a good opportunity to start devising “good endogenous policies” to live by…
African nations have long been subjected to extraversion logics from any standpoint… We need to start from our perspectives… Inside out.
One wonders a lot after all these years of institutional research and extensive publications over the woes preventing african development, what are those institutions awaiting to do to fix the imbalances…
In many ways such same institutions have to be seen as the cause of such issues challenging the very survival of Africa…
When will these institutions realize that all is needed is going straight to the farmers, allowing them to produce more while providing them with the market information they need to better value their professions?
2011 have proven to bring to light governments rhetoric on development… Civil societies in most countries have helped substantiate such a truth… to the expenses of lives… Now it’s clear that non-formal actors are the key players, what more is needed before these bureaucrats start paying attention to those that produce the grains..?
M. Demba
http://comengip.org