|
|
|
|
Hemmed In: Responses to Africa's Economic Decline
Thomas M. Callaghy and John Ravenhill, editors
New York
1993
7: Coping With Confusion: African Farmers' Responses to Economic Instability in the 1970s and 1980s
S ARA B ERRY
For most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, the 1980s were years of economic decline, marked by escalating levels of external debt and debt service obligations. In the short term, the crisis of the 1980s may be traced to a particularly unfavorable sequence of environmental and world market shocks in the 1970s, compounded by policies that reflected recently independent African governments' struggles to consolidate their power, rather than any consistent set of economic plans. 1 In addition to declining levels of income, output, basic services, and in some cases capital stock, African economies faced increasing instability in external markets, government policy, and domestic economic conditions. The impact of global and national instability on indicators of macroeconomic performance in Africa has been reviewed elsewhere. 2 In this chapter, I will look at how external shocks, together with shifts in government policies, have affected the conditions under which most Africans live and work; describe some of the strategies Africans have used to cope with instability; and explore their implications for understanding recent trends in economic performance, especially in agriculture.
My argument about how African farmers cope with instability, and how their strategies have affected recent trends in agricultural performance, derives partly from the general literature on how low-income farmers in developing economies cope with risk and uncertainty. Low-income farmers have trouble coping with risk not because they are innately conservative, but because they are poor. Because they have few assets (and hence little or no access to credit) to tide them over periods of poor harvest or shortfalls in income, they often choose crops, methods of production, or off-farm activities likely to yield some income (in cash or kind) at regular, short intervals, rather than those which might yield higher returns, but only at longer or less regular intervals. In this respect, African farmers are like poor farmers in other parts of the world.
In addition, African farmers' reactions to instability reflect the specific conditions under which they live and work. These have, in turn, been influenced not only by ecological and cultural conditions, which vary from one locality in Africa to another, but also by historical patterns of social and political change. In this chapter, I will examine the recent history of agrarian crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa in terms of the longer history of agrarian change since the beginning of colonial rule. I will argue that people's strategies for generating a livelihood and managing assets reflect the conditions under which they gain access to the means of production. Access to the means of production in rural areas of Africa has been subject to instability and struggle since colonial times. Accordingly, recent patterns of production and investment are best understood as outcomes of a conjuncture between long-term patterns of contested access to productive resources, and the increasing volatility of rural economic conditions since the 1970s.
The chapter is organized as follows. The first section describes recent patterns and sources of instability in rural income earning opportunities, including frequent shifts in government policies. This is followed by a brief discussion of the longer-term dynamic of struggle over access to the means of agricultural production in Sub-Saharan Africa; a section on farmers' strategies for coping with destabilization; and a concluding section on the implications of individuals' coping strategies for agricultural performance.
Recent Crises (1973-88)
Since the late 1960s, much of Sub-Saharan Africa has been subjected to a series of shocks, including major droughts, war, large increases in world oil prices, global recession, and declining export prices, which put severe strains on governments struggling to establish stable systems of self-government and launch sustained programs of economic development. The combination of world recession, mounting African debt, and increasingly depressed conditions within African economies undermined investors' confidence, contributing to a vicious cycle of declining private capital inflows which, together with stagnant or declining export earnings and purchasing power, forced African governments not only to borrow more from official sources in the 1980s but also to handle a large part of their mounting debt service obligations by rescheduling or accumulating arrears. 3
In addition to declining levels of income and access to basic commodities and services, both world market conditions and many of the measures governments have taken to cope with them served to destabilize domestic markets and income-earning opportunities. In addition to the external shocks that helped to precipitate economic decline in Africa, since 1970, global commodity prices have fluctuated more widely than before. 4 Global commodity price instability and fluctuations in Sub-Saharan Africa's barter terms of trade made it difficult for governments to predict, let alone offset, the impact of world price shocks on their domestic economies. In a study of 58 developing economies, Guillaumont argued that the impact of unstable export volumes (as well as prices) on savings and growth was negative for all developing economies, but more so for low-income countries, many of which are in Sub-Saharan Africa. 5
External instability was especially costly in Sub-Saharan Africa because of African economies' heavy dependence on imports. In a study of 24 African economies, Helleiner found significant negative relationships between (1) the annual rate of growth of GDP and instability of import volume, and (2) growth and the income terms of trade for the entire period from 1960 to 1980. 6 He concludes that, by the 1980s, there was little African governments could do to reverse the decline, without access to substantially larger flows of external resources than were currently available or projected. 7
Volatile world market prices helped to destabilize agricultural prices and incomes within African economies both directly through fluctuations in farmers' earnings from export crops, and indirectly through fluctuations in the cost of imported foodstuffs and hence in demand for domestically produced substitutes. In attempting to maintain adequate supplies of imports and domestic foodstuffs, donor agencies and African governments sometimes adopted coping strategies that further destabilized domestic markets and conditions of production. Price and exchange controls drove an increasing volume of transactions into parallel markets, subjecting traders to added risks and the expense of concealment or bribery. 8 Crash programs in agricultural development such as Operation Feed the Nation (Nigeria) or Operation Feed Yourself (Ghana) were undertaken in the mid-70s, only to be abandoned within a few years for lack of funds or results. Cooperatives, planned villages, local development committees, etc., were created and dismantled, or sidelined, with bewildering frequency. 9
In the 1980s, African governments found themselves unable to maintain basic infrastructure and services, such as transportation, education, and health. 10 Without money to maintain imports of crucial intermediate goods (gasoline, tires, vehicle parts, medicine, etc.) basic services declined, crippling the production and the marketing of agricultural as well as industrial goods. 11 In some countries (e.g., Zambia, Ghana, Tanzania) these developments compounded processes of decline that had been underway since the 1960s.
In the context of declining imports and mounting external debt, structural adjustment programs undertaken in the 1980s proved sharply contractionary. 12 Urban incomes fell, sometimes sharply. In a startling passage, which praises African governments for making progress in correcting urban-rural bias, the Bank noted some dramatic shifts in urban-rural income ratios: "In Tanzania, between 1980 and 1984, real farm incomes are estimated to have risen by 5%, while urban wage earners faced a decline of 50%. . . . In Ghana, during the same period, farm incomes stagnated but urban incomes fell by 40%. Such evidence leaves little doubt that the reforming governments have helped (sic) to raise the terms of trade between the countryside and the city"! 13
As expected, labor and capital did move back into agriculture after devaluation but, once there, faced volatile prices and unreliable transport and marketing services, which added to the uncertainty of returns to labor and working capital caused by weather, pest and disease attack, and the normal vicissitudes of domestic and local economic life. 14 The dilemmas of volatility were reflected in contradictory relations between agriculture and the nonagricultural sectors. At the same time that people were moving into agriculture to escape severe declines in urban incomes, studies of rural households found that household food security depended critically on access to income from non-farm activities, such as crafts, petty trade, and wage employment. 15 In Zambia, foreign exchange was so scarce that allocations were shifted unpredictably, as the government veered from one stopgap measure to another, in an effort to stave off pressures from foreign creditors, suppliers, and/or domestic interest groups. Good estimates that as much as one-third of the maize purchased from Zambian farmers in 1985 was never collected. While causes of this debacle were complex, it is significant that foreign exchange allotments for imports of diesel fuels, tires, and jute bags were inexplicably diverted at the last minute. 16
Poor farmers suffered from unstable domestic markets for crops and basic consumer goods, but instability also posed problems for large-scale farms, the more so as they tend to be fully commercialized. In northern Ghana, large upland rice farms launched in the mid-70s with sizeable government subsidies declined when the subsidies were withdrawn a few years later. 17 In Nigeria, even multinational corporations found large-scale farming unprofitable because of uncertainties of labor supply and prices. 18
In short, there is considerable evidence that conditions under which rural household members live and work have been extremely unstable in recent years. Not only have prices fluctuated widely, but access to off-farm employment, foodstuffs, basic consumer goods, agricultural inputs, transportation, health care, and education have also been subject to severe and unpredictable fluctuations. 19 To understand how rural household members have struggled to escape impoverishment and cope with instability, and how their struggles have shaped agricultural performance, we must look at the conditions under which farmers gain access to the means of production. These, as will be argued in the next section, have been subject to instability and tension since colonial times.
Contested Access to the Means of Production.
In recent years, there has been a growing interest among students of African rural development in understanding conditions of access to the means of production in rural economies. This interest has been sparked in part by the limited effectiveness of many rural development programs in Africa. Many observers have noted the persistence of traditional systems of land tenure, agricultural production, and labor and credit mobilization in rural African economies, but they do not agree on its implications for patterns of resource allocation and agricultural growth. On one hand, there is ample evidence that neither traditional land tenure practices nor the absence of formal credit institutions in rural areas blocked agricultural growth and commercialization in the past. 20 Market activity has been widespread in rural areas of Africa for a long time, and has encompassed commercial transactions in productive inputs and services, as well as in final goods. 21
Nonetheless, the conviction remains that African rural factor markets are very imperfect. 22 Development experts frequently assert that communal tenure is widespread in Africa and results in serious misallocation of productive resources, over time as well as among crops and farms. 23 Hence, it is argued, sustained growth of agricultural output and productivity will require a radical transformation of the conditions under which African farmers gain access to the means of production. 24 It is less fashionable to criticize family labor and informal credit arrangements as inefficient, but they are presumed to be noncommercial and, hence, potentially inhibiting to rural development.
Part of the apparent contradiction between those who tout the prevalence of the market principle in rural Africa, and those who emphasize the crippling effects of market imperfections and/or precapitalist modes of production, arises from the conceptual framework of the debate. Actual changes in conditions of access over time cannot be accurately described in terms of dichotomies such as private vs. communal ownership, or commercial vs. social mechanisms of resource mobilization and management. Since precolonial times access to productive resources has been predicated on social identity defined by membership and/or status within social groups, including families, communities, political factions, religious brotherhoods, etc. 25
However, it does not follow that rural African economies were characterized by communal property rights or collective modes of labor mobilization and management. Access to resources was contingent on membership in descent groups or communities, but the boundaries of such groups were overlapping and fluid. When a community or lineage incorporated new members, through marriage, slavery, fostering, etc., newcomers were assigned culturally sanctioned positions: wife, slave, child, client, disciple within the relevant group. However, the way culturally defined status was translated into specific rights to land and labor, obligations to work for or pay tribute to others, etc., varied from one individual or group to another, depending on relations among the particular people involved. In some cases, the process of absorbing new members into established groups could lead to the redefinition of criteria for membership, or of rules governing relations among group members. In some areas, for example, slaves were fully absorbed into the descent groups of their masters, even adopting new ethnic identities over the course of a generation or two 26 , while in others, descendants of slaves retained separate and inferior status for generations. 27 Changing economic and political conditions gave rise both to new claims on land and labor and to new rounds of struggle over the definition of social identity and the meaning of status.
However, negotiations over the meaning of social identity or status could prove inconclusive, or be reopened when circumstances changed, creating tension and ambiguity rather than a clear reformulation of the rules. In such circumstances, exchanges of rights to land and labor were neither subordinated to the market principle nor exempt from it. Access to land, labor, and capital was acquired not through definitive transactions in rights of exclusive access and control, but through the negotiation of social identities which were themselves fluid and multifaceted. For example, in Asante, slaves who sought assimilation into local descent groups were aided by a taboo on speaking openly of anyone's slave origin, but hindered by their mothers' inability to trace legitimate descent from local matrilineages. 28 In central Kenya, the ritual of blood brotherhood was used to facilitate trade and migration by creating fictive kinship ties among trading partners, but it was sometimes repudiated by communities seeking to protect themselves from floods of immigrants in times of scarcity. 29 Similarly, in societies where bridewealth was paid in installments, sometimes completed after the death of the married couple, marriage was not a single event, but a lifetime process. 30
Negotiations over social relations frequently involved exchanges of goods and/or money as gifts, bridewealth, or through ceremonies marking changes in status or social membership. In this way, the accelerating pace of rural commercialization in the twentieth century could act to reinforce traditional mechanisms of resource acquisition, rather than overthrowing them or rendering them obsolete. Bridewealth inflation, the monetization of older forms of tribute, which often accompanied the spread of cash cropping, and the ubiquity of rotating credit societies are all examples of this process. But commercialization also intensified the pace of renegotiation, rendering the specific meaning of traditional social status more changeable at the same time that it reinforced the salience of status in general as a means of defining access to productive resources.
If commercialization did not lead to a revolution in African rural factor markets, neither did the creation of colonial (later national) boundaries and systems of government. Colonial administrators brought European ideas about property, contract, and credit to Africa, but lacked the means to transform African systems of access along European lines. When they attempted to do this directly-e.g., through forced labor or by rounding up scattered, mobile peoples into permanent settlements-they succeeded mainly in disrupting indigenous methods of production and resource management. The decline of citemene agriculture in northeastern Zambia is a case in point.
Most colonial regimes in Africa were expected to pay their own way, raising revenue from their colonial subjects and employing Africans to supplement the often very limited numbers of European staff provided by their home governments. 31
Elsewhere, colonial authorities tried to govern by indirect rule, mobilizing not only African labor, but also local collaborators-Africans in positions of traditional authority who could help collect taxes, mobilize labor, and keep order. 32 In addition to coopting or creating African chiefs as local agents of colonial rule, European administrators sought to maintain a stable social order in the colonies by coopting traditional systems of law and governance. Indirect rule, as this strategy was known, entailed the preservation of native law and custom, not just as a smokescreen for European extraction of Africa's resources, but also as a practical method of keeping down the costs of colonial administration.
When they were unable to find suitable traditional authorities, officials created them. Known as warrant chiefs, such individuals lacked traditional legitimacy, were exempt from established constraints on the abuse of power, and formed an unpopular and often destabilizing element in local systems of colonial government. 33 And, as with African chiefs, so with African cultures: when colonial officials did not find established, clearly bounded, homogeneous and mutually exclusive tribal polities on which to build the foundations of a stable, inexpensive system of government, they created them by carving out tribal reserves or demarcating large areas of social life to be governed according to native law and custom.
Neither warrant chiefs nor warrant cultures worked very well. Since precolonial lines of authority and social boundaries were often changing or contested, indirect rule meant, in practice, that conflict and instability were incorporated into the fabric of colonial administration. 34 To the extent that rules of access and/or processes of law enforcement and adjudication in African societies were already subject to contest and change, indirect rule tended to internalize struggle and instability, in the name of stable government and continuity with the past. Rights to land, labor, and capital goods (such as livestock or tree crops) continued to rest on social identity, but social identities were now subject not only to redefinition through shifting relations among Africans, but also to ambiguities arising from the colonizers' efforts to build a stable administration on inherently unstable or dynamic systems of customary rules and practices.
Conditions of access remained ambiguous and contested after independence. The policies of colonial regimes after 1945 were profoundly influenced by the global depression of the 1930s, and a growing concern among colonial officials with soil erosion, deforestation, and other signs of environmental degradation in Africa. 35 In Europe and the United States, the depression and the dust bowls of the 1930s stimulated the development of Keynesian economics and both public and scientific concern with conservation. Together, these developments generated a powerful rationale for increased state intervention in the management of productive resources and economic activity.
In Africa, they helped to legitimize what has been called the second colonial occupation. 36 After 1945, colonial regimes introduced comprehensive new programs of economic management in Africa, including large-scale development projects (the Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme, the Niger Agricultural Project, an expanded Gezira Scheme, etc.); increased levels of public spending on infrastructure, amenities, and education; and legislation designed to rationalize land tenure or regulate conditions of labor supply on a national scale. At the local level, however, increased state intervention continued to be administered through Native Authorities, until the 1950s when, in many colonies, African nationalists' demands for self-government helped to sweep aside gradualist programs for economic and administrative reforms, in favor of rapid decolonization. 37
To a large extent, independent African governments carried on the late colonial legacy of expanded state intervention in the management of national economies. Development schemes proliferated, government spending on infrastructure and administration increased, and government controls over prices and trade were greatly expanded. 38 All of this cost money, which was raised in large part through taxes on agriculture. State development programs also generated sharp increases in demand for imports, prompting governments to try to control import spending by expanding controls over foreign trade and payments, policies that were to continue in one form or another until the 1980s. 39
Some independent African governments also launched ambitious schemes to transform conditions of access to the means of production. Land reform laws enacted in Kenya, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, and later Nigeria, were intended to rationalize the land tenure system in order to promote more productive patterns of resource use, and faster rates of agricultural growth. In the minds of their promulgators, influx controls and orders to expel aliens could be seen as logical (and therefore legitimate?) extensions of the idea that economic development requires massive state intervention into conditions of production and exchange.
In practice, increased state intervention did not lead to a dramatic transformation of conditions of access at the local level. Like their colonial predecessors, African governments have struggled to govern and promote expanded economic activity with limited funds and trained personnel, and have also sought to coopt local resources and authorities to strengthen their own administrative and fiscal capacity. Zambian chiefs, stripped of their prerogatives in the first flush of post-independence enthusiasm for modernization, regained them as government-created institutions failed to deliver promised services, solve disputes, or effectively regulate access to local resources. In Nigeria, chiefs' powers were reduced more gradually, but proved equally hard to eliminate even after several decades of independence.
For purposes of both administration and political mobilization, African leaders appealed to traditional rubrics of loyalty and legitimacy, often sharpening ethnic conflict in the process. If anything, independent African governments acted to increase the political salience of social identity, strengthening people's incentives to use them as channels of access to resources and opportunities. Accordingly, the panoply of increasingly comprehensive and costly government measures to regulate economic activity, which were initiated after 1945 and extended and elaborated after independence, enhanced and perpetuated struggles to use social identity to gain access to resources. In the process, they also reproduced the tendency for rules of access to be challenged repeatedly. Land-reform programs and development projects created new arenas of contest and introduced new resources to struggle over, rather than decisively redefining the rules of the game. Controls on prices, imports, and exchange rates erected new barriers to be lowered or evaded through negotiation, bribery, or the manipulation of political loyalties. In rural Zambia in the late 1970s, one observer found that access to land and labor was not so much shaped by development policies and their intended and unintended consequences as by arbitration sessions, which were chaired by the chief, in which land and headmanships were discussed and by local court sittings which dealt mostly with disputes between cowives. 40
In short, access to resources was mediated through a complex process, in which income and wealth were used to influence social identities, and vice versa. Two consequences of the dynamic of resource access and control outlined here are of particular relevance to the present argument. The first was a tendency for claims on land or other forms of property to multiply over time. Because social identities and statuses were subject to change over time, claims on resources that hinged on social identity tended to change too. As one ethnographer put it, in discussing rights to tree crops in Cameroon, even when a farm was sold outright to a single individual in exchange for cash, that farm did not thereby become a piece of private property in the Western sense. Rather, over time, other members of social networks to which the purchaser belonged were likely to assert claims to the farm as relatives, heirs, former laborers, etc. 41 Similar patterns are described in studies of other rural economies across Africa. 42
Second, since social identity and status could be achieved as well as ascribed, Africans also had strong incentives to invest time and money in acquiring or validating their membership in social networks, and/or advancing their status within them. Numerous studies of rural expenditure patterns have noted that farmers' outlays on ceremonies do not appear to wither away under the influence of rural commercialization or economic growth. On the contrary, in areas where expanding economic opportunities intensified competition for access to productive resources, farmers have often increased their investment in social relations through which they may assert or defend claims to the means of production.
As the foregoing discussion suggests, while both traditional and nontraditional social networks were important as channels of access to resources, they were not necessarily stable. By investing in social identity or status, farmers were not buying into closed, corporate, consensual communities, as Ranger describes the colonial stereotype of traditional African societies, 43 but rather into social arenas where people pursued influence and opportunity through shifting alliances or by contesting the boundaries or structures of the networks themselves. Boundaries of social networks have, accordingly, remained fluid and permeable, and institutions have tended to proliferate over time. It is within this context that farmers have organized their efforts to cope with increasing economic instability and decline since the early 1970s.
Coping with Instability
Literature on poor farmers' strategies for coping with risk often assumes that poor farmers are more averse to risk than prosperous or technically sophisticated ones and that, accordingly, they follow different strategies of resource use. This does not mean that poor farmers are inherently more conservative than wealthier ones. All farmers face unpredictable variations in yield (due to weather, disease, etc.) and price. Such uncertainties increase the cost of engaging in agricultural production: when yields or farm incomes are abnormally low, farmers must draw down assets or go into debt to provide for current needs. Prosperous farmers are no more indifferent to these problems than poor ones. They do, however, have more resources with which to cover the costs of providing insurance against sudden downturns in their revenues. Also, they are in a better position to take advantage of new opportunities and thereby strengthen their economic position over time. In the long run, the best way to increase one's economic security is to raise income or accumulate assets.
For poor farmers, however, access to opportunities to produce or earn more may be so limited that they provide little real protection against instability. At the least, increasing agricultural output or productivity is likely to take time, whereas the effects of sudden shifts in prices or output are immediate. Poor farmers are not, in other words, averse to maximizing profits; however, the concept of profit maximization conflates too many dimensions of farmers' strategies of resource acquisition and use to shed much light on behavior in specific contexts. In situations of unstable access to markets and resources, and/or unstable returns to productive activity, people are likely to make efforts to increase liquidity and to gain flexibility in the timing of labor inputs and other income-generating activities in order to be able to respond quickly to changes in economic conditions.
In this section I will describe some of the steps taken by African farmers to gain additional liquidity and flexibility in the face of fluctuations in output, prices, or access to input and commodity markets. In particular, I will discuss increased reliance on off-farm income, changes in cropping patterns and methods of cultivation, and patterns of investment. Few if any studies exist which trace precisely changes in the form and frequency of such activities in the wake of the world recession or the adoption of structural adjustment policies by African governments in the early 1980s. Instead, this discussion will draw on studies of farmers' methods of coping with instability in a variety of time periods to suggest some of the ways in which the recent destabilization of economic conditions in Africa may have altered or reinforced previous patterns of resource allocation and income use. The final section of the chapter will consider the implications of these effects for understanding the impact of recent destabilization on African agricultural performance.
Off-farm Income
Several recent studies have argued convincingly that access to off-farm income increases households' food security. Using data on household income and consumption from two villages in Burkina Faso, Reardon, et al. found that, in 1984 (a year of severe drought), the proportion of households with consumption security was higher in the Sahelian than in the Sudanic village, even though agricultural productivity is lower in the Sahel. 44 (Consumption security is defined as a level of food consumption at least 80% of FAO minimum calorie requirements for household members.) The Sahelians had an advantage: they earned a higher proportion of household income from off-farm sources. This enabled them to maintain consumption in the face of abnormally low yields more effectively than households in the Sudanic village, who derived a larger proportion of total real income from crop production and sales. The authors suggest, further, that farmers in the Sahelian village had come to rely on off-farm employment to a greater extent than those in the south, because their environment was generally poor and subject to frequent severe shortfalls in yield, leading them to spend more time and travel greater distances in search of opportunities for wage- or self-employment.
Although Reardon, et al., did not trace changes in households' income sources over time, their findings suggest that, if agricultural production and marketing become increasingly unstable, farmers may well increase their efforts to gain access to additional sources of off-farm income, in order to protect their levels of consumption and investment. Common sources of off-farm income are (a) working for other local farmers, (b) trade or other rural non-farm enterprises, and (c) migration in search of employment or opportunities for self-employment in more prosperous regions. Each has somewhat different implications for agricultural performance.
One way to supplement farm income is for members of farming households to hire themselves out to more prosperous neighbors. In addition, people who seek to increase their income security by hiring out may try to obtain shorter contracts, in order to gain greater flexibility in allocating their own time, or to reduce the time intervals between receipts of wages, in cash or in kind. Instability would therefore help to explain the trend, noted in a number of studies, toward daily or task contracts, as opposed to annual or permanent labor arrangements. 45
Farmers may also seek off-farm income by engaging in trade. Diversification into trade often occurs as a result of agricultural growth. Farmers who have made some money from cash crop production invest part of their profits in local trade, either buying agricultural produce for sale to wholesalers or agents of marketing boards 46 or purchasing consumption goods or agricultural inputs to retail in rural markets. 47
However, farmers may also move into trade in response to market destabilization. Unstable markets increase the risks and reduce the average returns to both trade and farming, but trade entails greater liquidity. Crops take weeks or months to mature, during which time prices of crops, labor, and other variable inputs may change dramatically, leaving the farmer exposed to considerable risk. Although traders may find themselves stuck with unsold inventories, they are not locked into biologically determined production periods of several weeks' or months' duration, as are farmers. A small stock of trade goods can usually be turned over fairly quickly, so that traders are in a better position than farmers to get out of a declining market and move into a more favorable one on short notice. The relative liquidity of trade compared to farming does not mean that trading profits are high: for many petty traders in both rural and urban areas in Africa they are miserably low. But for people who must cope with unstable markets in addition to poverty, trade may appear preferable to farming because of its liquidity.
The fact that farmers may be attempting to increase their involvement in off-farm employment (or self-employment) does not mean that employment opportunities will automatically increase to accommodate them. Opportunities depend on the level of demand in regional or even national economies, and on transportation facilities, etc., linking rural areas to centers of demand. Individual efforts to increase income or avert risk will reap higher returns in a prosperous economy than in a poor one. This does not mean, however, that people won't use similar strategies to cope with similar problems in both cases.
My point may be illustrated with a brief comparison of farmers' strategies in northeastern Zambia and western Nigeria during the 1970s. In both countries, national economic conditions were increasingly unstable during this decade, but Zambia was involved in a prolonged recession brought on by the collapse of the world copper price, whereas Nigeria was in the midst of the oil boom.
Once a flourishing labor reserve, which exported male labor to the copper belt and received substantial flows of remittances in return, 48 the Mambwe area in northeastern Zambia was badly hurt by the collapse of the world copper market in the early 1970s. 49 By 1978, the region was severely depressed, suffering from poor dietary variation and an unprecedented shortage of basic foodstuffs. 50 While many former miners and their relatives had returned to the rural areas, 51 Pottier found that many had not returned to farming, but were eking out a precarious living in petty trade. The preference for trade over farming was strikingly illustrated by the Mambwe response to high prices for beans. Although bean cropping was warmly recommended by local politicians and town planners, and sales increased, bean fever has not resulted in land development and higher levels of local agricultural production. Rather the opposite is true, for the Zambian grassland Mambwe prefer to buy up cheap beans, and millet, in villages across the border in Tanzania. 52 In this way, they shielded themselves against the possibility that the government would change its mind and reduce the price again before a full cropping season had passed leaving them with a harvest of beans that could be sold only at a loss. 53
I encountered a similar response to destabilized markets in western Nigeria in the 1970s. In this case, aggregate demand was growing rapidly, due to Nigeria's booming petroleum exports. The effect of the oil boom on low-income households in western Nigeria was, in many ways, a mirror image of the impact of the copper recession in northeastern Zambia. Soaring foreign exchange earnings led to rapid growth in demand for imports, and considerable domestic inflation. Prices of food crops and other agricultural staples rose even faster than the general price index, but this apparently did not lead to significant growth in agricultural production. Instead, people devoted their energy and working capital to acquiring imported goods and reselling them in local markets. In Nigeria's booming petro-economy, where anyone who could buy a sack of rice or wheat flour could resell it at a profit in a few weeks or even days, there was little incentive to invest money or labor in cultivating crops that would require months to mature, might yield poorly, and whose price might decline relative to prices of other goods between planting and harvest time. 54
In addition to trade and agricultural employment, rural household members also migrate out of rural areas in search of opportunities for off-farm employment or self-employment. Fluctuations in employment opportunities in urban areas are transmitted to rural communities through variations in the incomes and remittances of rural migrants, as well as in domestic and global demand for agricultural commodities. Both mechanisms contribute, in turn, to the destabilization of rural living conditions in the wake of fluctuations in global markets. In addition, whether or not migrants remit part of their earnings, 55 the withdrawal of labor from agriculture often induces changes in cropping patterns and methods of cultivation, which reinforce patterns of production that farmers use to cope with increasingly unstable markets.
Cropping Patterns
Faced with increasing economic instability, farmers may shift resources into the cultivation of crops (or combinations of crops) which increase their liquidity or allow them more flexibility in the allocation of labor time. Liquid crops include those which are readily saleable and/or mature relatively quickly. Flexible crops are those whose yields are relatively insensitive to the timing of labor inputs. In other words, the search for liquidity may lead farmers to sell a higher proportion of their output, contrary to the popular notion that risk aversion causes farmers to withdraw from markets and become self-sufficient. In a recent study of the famine of 1941 in Malawi, Vaughan questioned the view that increased tobacco cultivation by smallholders in the 1930s contributed to the famine. 56 In fact, tobacco growing households were better able to withstand the famine, since they could buy food when their own ran out. Similar points have been made in studies of households' strategies for coping with recent famines in Africa.
Faster maturing crops also increase liquidity by reducing the time farmers must wait for a return on their labor. Social scientists working on the design of technical improvements appropriate to African farming systems have suggested that maximizing yield may be less important than reducing time intervals between labor inputs and returns to them. In Rwanda, farmers interviewed by staff members from the International Potato Center were more interested in shorter maturing varieties of potatoes than in higher yielding ones. 57 Similar considerations help to explain the spread of cassava cultivation in many areas. 58
In general, cassava and traditional varieties of swamp rice are two crops that have persisted (or spread) in recent years because they allow farmers considerable flexibility in allocating their labor time. Traditional swamp rice cultivation requires a fairly even flow of unskilled labor inputs over the growing season, whereas upland rice cultivation is characterized by seasonal peaks of labor input and requires a variety of specialized skills. 59 Swamp rice lends itself to cultivation by individuals working alone, or by unskilled hire labor. In contrast, upland rice cultivation is better suited to larger farming units, capable of mobilizing and coordinating activities of a number of people with different skills. 60 Also, yields are less dependent on the timing of labor inputs in swamp than in upland rice cultivation, another reason why swamp rice is easier to cultivate for individuals who lack access to others' labor. 61 Yields of improved rice grown on irrigated perimeters are, however, more sensitive to the timing of labor inputs, which has limited farmers' willingness to take up plots in irrigated schemes in some areas. 62
A staple crop that allows farmers a great deal of flexibility in labor timing and income management is cassava, the cultivation of which is thought to have increased substantially in Africa in recent years. 63 Apart from planting, which must take place far enough in advance of the end of the rainy season for stakes to sprout properly, variations in the timing of inputs have little effect on yield. Mature cassava roots can remain underground without deteriorating for long periods (up to 24 months for some varieties). Thus, farmers have a great deal of leeway in managing the harvest and sale of cassava. The crop may be harvested little by little, for immediate consumption or for sale, or farmers may wait for a favorable price, then harvest the crop all at once. In other words, cassava has very flexible labor requirements and is well-suited to cultivation both by subsistence-oriented farmers and by fully commercialized ones, working with or without hired labor.
The advantages of particular crops in enhancing farmers' ability to cope with unstable markets and conditions of production depend not only on the biological characteristics of the crop and on local agroecological conditions, but also on who grows them. If, for example, married women grow wet rice on household fields, the output of which is controlled by the male head of the household, then they do not necessarily gain either flexibility or liquidity by allocating more of their labor to rice production. Studies of irrigated rice projects in West Africa suggest that new technology and resources may provoke domestic conflict and/or lead women to withdraw labor from rice growing on plots managed by their husbands or other male kin. 64 Cassava, on the other hand, is a crop women often grow on their own account, so that the advantages of flexibility accrue entirely to them. This may help to explain why women farmers have been found to rely increasingly on cassava in situations where their livelihoods are becoming increasingly precarious or subject to unpredictable changes. 65 Similarly, many swamp rice farmers are women, who have little access to extra labor and must fit cultivation into a daily schedule characterized by multiple, varying demands on their time. 66
In short, whether or not farmers sell a larger proportion of crop output in the wake of market destabilization depends on their access to markets; on who grows what crops and on what terms; and on the availability of alternative sources of liquidity. Increasing reliance on cassava or swamp rice may be a means to increased commercialization, rather than an alternative. Similarly, more individualized cultivation can increase flexibility, by releasing farmers' time from uninterruptible tasks such as mobilizing and supervising labor for more liquid activities such as off-farm employment. I will return to this point below.
Methods of Production
Alternative techniques of cultivation also have different implications for liquidity and flexibility although, as in the case of cropping patterns, the flexibility associated with a particular technique varies from one socioeconomic context to another. For example, intercropping is frequently cited as a technique which not only saves labor and raises total yield per unit of cultivated land 67 , but also stretches out the time over which a cultivated plot and the labor invested in it yield some return. 68
However, in some localities farmers have increased monocropping in order to gain added flexibility or to reduce the waiting period between harvests. In the early 1980s, Fresco found that women in Kwango-Kwilu (Zaire) were not only cultivating more cassava, relative to other crops, but also staggering times of planting and harvest, reducing fallows, and monocropping more cassava than in the past. She concludes that "the remarkable flexibility of present farming systems . . . made . . . growth in food production possible for women with no access to labor other than their own." 69
Similarly, Guyer found in 1988 that Yoruba women were more likely than men to specialize completely in cassava. In her sample, women's farms were smaller than men's, but more commercialized. Women hired a larger proportion of their labor and sold a larger share of their output. Guyer also found a marked increase since 1970 in the number of Yoruba women farming on their own account. Her findings are therefore consistent with my argument that instability does not necessarily lead farmers either to withdraw from markets or to diversify crop production per se. 70 On the contrary, economic instability may promote increased commercialization and specialization, even by very small-scale farm enterprises.
Patterns of Investment
Since the management of instability is, by definition, a matter of allocating resources over time, one would expect to find African farmers adjusting their strategies of investment as well as current production and income earning in the face of destabilization. I will limit my discussion to investment in stocks and social networks-two forms of investment which appear to be closely related to farmers' efforts to manage instability. 71 The argument made above about the advantages of trade relative to crop production in conditions of instability implies that farmers will invest in stocks, which can be rapidly turned over, in preference to capital goods with long gestation or payoff periods and/or limited resale markets. Such preferences are reflected in the behavior of farmers described by Pottier in northeast Zambia, by Shepherd in northern Ghana, and those I observed in western Nigeria. 72
In addition, I would suggest that the destabilization of recent years has reinforced patterns of investment in social relations, which have had an important influence on the course of rural development in the long run. Previously in this chapter, I described a long-standing tendency for African farmers to invest in social relations as mechanisms of access to markets and the means of production, and argued that, while such investments certainly predate the colonial period, they were reinforced and expanded under colonial rule. Colonial administrators' efforts to build stable systems of government onto customary rules and structures generated unresolved debates over the meaning of custom. To protect or extend their access to productive resources in a world of contested rules and procedures, farmers were obliged to keep renewing (or, if possible, multiplying) their memberships in social networks through which access was negotiated. The resulting dynamic of struggle over resources and meanings, and investment in social status and identities, continued after independence. It has been reinforced, in recent years, by increasingly unstable conditions of resource mobilization and exchange.
For example, studies of rural expenditure patterns have shown no tendency for farmers to abandon (or even significantly reduce) expenditures on acquiring or reinforcing membership in social networks. Outlays on ceremonies, bridewealth payments, construction of family houses, or the education of close and distant kin figure as prominently in rural budgets in the 1970s and 1980s as in earlier times. 73
In some areas, kin groups and other traditional institutions have been reorganized in an effort to keep abreast of changing economic conditions and practices. In western Nigeria in the late 1970s, descent groups were electing or appointing officers, opening bank accounts, and issuing circulars to announce annual meetings, at which kinsmen not only celebrated weddings, funerals, and naming ceremonies, or strategized over traditional title disputes, but also discussed scholarships, the management of family assets, or the launching of development projects to enrich themselves or their communities. 74
An analogous process has been described in central Kenya, in relation to the land reform program initiated in the 1950s. Under the land reform laws, in order to register title to a piece of land, the individuals involved must first demonstrate the legitimacy of their claims. In many cases, the effect of the law legalizing private land ownership was to strengthen and enlarge descent groups (mbari). To raise money for litigation in order to establish claim to land titles, mbari not only rallied their members, but also accepted contributions from non-kin. In the event the litigation was successful, contributors would be rewarded with a piece of the land. In effect, the land reform law created a market for equity in extended families. 75
The increased salience of social networks as means of access to productive resources does not mean either that traditional institutions provide a reliable safety net for impoverished or crisis-stricken rural households, or that corporate groups are gaining in size or importance with respect to rural resource management. For one thing, impoverishment and instability affect whole families and communities, undermining their ability to provide security for any of their members, let alone all. In declining (or unstable) economies, the returns to investment in social memberships are likely to be low (or uncertain). 76 Second, the meanings of social memberships are often contested, or redefined, as leaders compete for followers and people pursue resources and opportunities through social relationships. 77
However, especially in rural areas, Africans do not appear to be losing interest in maintaining social networks, even if, as safety nets they tend to sag and tear. Rather, the reaction to economic decline or destabilization is often to diversify one's portfolio of social relations by proliferating memberships. Indeed, in some areas, the reproduction of extended family or community networks as mechanisms of access has gone hand in hand with a trend toward smaller units of agricultural production, as people seek flexibility in the management of their daily schedules together with diversification in their access to potential avenues of opportunity or the means of production.
For example, in Hausa communities in northern Nigeria and southern Niger, researchers have reported both a decline in the size of farming units 78 and an increase in the numbers of people asserting claims to land and other rural resources through their membership in extended families. 79 In central Kenya, farming units consist almost entirely of nuclear families 80 but, as we've seen, mbari have experienced a resurgence under the land reform. Similarly, observers have described simultaneous trends toward individualized cultivation and investment in extended family networks in rice-growing areas of the western humid zone and in tree crop growing areas in Nigeria, Ghana, and Côte d'Ivoire. 81
Implications for Agricultural Performance
Instability tends to promote cropping patterns, methods of cultivation, and modes of organizing agricultural production which increase farmers' liquidity and/or permit them flexibility in the management of labor time. Cultivation of cassava and swamp rice has increased; production units have shrunk. Farmers do not withdraw from unstable markets: on the contrary, they often increase crop sales or engage in more off-farm employment in order to increase their liquidity. However, crops and techniques of production chosen on the basis of their flexibility in the short run, do not necessarily serve to enhance the sustainability of agricultural production in the long run. Under unstable economic and political conditions, farmers are reluctant to tie up land, labor, and capital in long-term projects, such as soil conservation, water control, or fixed capital formation, which may sustain soil fertility or augment available land and labor. Also, increases in time spent on off-farm employment or out-migration reinforce trends toward smaller farming units and investment in more liquid assets.
The implications of these patterns for agricultural performance and policy design are not obvious. If demand for commodities and labor is fixed in the aggregate, farmers' efforts to sell a larger share of their output and/or spend more time in off-farm employment will tend to drive down crop prices and wages, so that farmers gain liquidity and flexibility at the expense of income. In recent years of declining per capita incomes, African farmers' efforts to protect themselves against instability may therefore have intensified the impoverishment of their families and small-scale farming as a whole.
However, this argument rests on the implicit assumption that there is a relatively constant ratio between the level of real income in an economy and the volume of transactions in both commodity and labor markets-an assumption that may not hold in African rural economies. For many African farmers, selling a higher proportion of their output means that they also buy more of what they consume-a pattern that will be reinforced if time spent in off-farm employment undermines their ability to time their own farming tasks well and thus reduces their yields. 82 Also, African employers are often themselves farmers, traders, or artisans with political and social ties to the communities in which they live and work. Rather than take advantage of increasing labor supply to force down wages, they may prefer to absorb additional workers and/or dependents, thus enhancing their own status and influence within the community and, where supralocal politicians or administrators seek to work through local notables, beyond it. In such cases, farmers' efforts to increase their participation in trade, crop sales and/or off-farm employment may serve to increase the number of transactions in goods and productive services, rather than to raise or lower levels of real output. The result is a kind of inflationary process, whose effects on economic growth and distribution may well operate through changing expectations and strategies of investment, rather than through short-run shifts in prices and quantities.
Recent instability has also reinforced long-term trends toward the proliferation of social networks and people's memberships in them. Fluid, noncorporate networks have permitted such diversification, but clearly people cannot sustain regular, active participation in an indefinite number of networks. Accordingly, as social memberships proliferate, people tend to shift their attention and energy from one group or institution to another, depending on immediate needs. The result is a high degree of mobility of people and resources, but little tendency for institutions to develop into stable frameworks for collective action, resource management or the consolidation of capital and knowledge.
Thus, African farmers' struggles to cope with turbulent, unstable economic and political conditions in recent years have contributed to resource mobility and flexible patterns of production and social organization, but not necessarily to creating conditions for sustained agricultural growth, for becoming less "hemmed in." Structural adjustment policies, and other development programs predicated on the notion that markets with low barriers to entry and a high degree of resource mobility promote productive patterns of resource use may not be appropriate for African social realities.
Note 1: Described in the Ravenhill, Green, and Gordon chapters of this volume. See also Kevin Cleaver, Impact of Price and Exchange Rate Policies in Sub-Saharan Africa, World Bank Staff Working Paper No. 728 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1985); Carol Lancaster and John Williamson, eds., African Debt and Financing (Washington: D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1986); and Tore Rose, ed., Crisis and Recovery in Sub-Saharan Africa (Paris: OECD, 1985). Back.
Note 2: See especially Gerald Helleiner, "Outward Orientation, Import Instability and African Economic Growth: An Empirical Investigation," in S. Lall and F. Stewart, eds., Theory and Reality in Development: Essays in Honor of Paul Streeten (New York: St. Martins, 1986); "Balance of Payments Experiences and Growth Prospects of Developing Countries: A Synthesis, World Development 14, 8 (1986): 877-908; and "The Question of Conditionality," in Lancaster and Williamson, eds., African Debt; David Wheeler, "Sources of Stagnation in Sub-Saharan Africa," World Development 12, 1 (1984): 1-23. Back.
Note 3: World Bank, Financing Adjustment with Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1986), p. 11; also see the Ravenhill, Green, and Gordon chapters in this volume. Back.
Note 4: Alfred Maizels, ed., Primary Commodities in the World Economy: Problems and Policies, a special issue of World Development 15, 5 (1987). Back.
Note 5: Patrick Guillaumont, "From Export Instability Effects to International Stabilization Policies," World Development 15, 5 (1987): 633-642. Back.
Note 6: Helleiner, "Balance of Payments." For a subgroup of seventeen African countries, plus six South Asian ones, no such relationship existed; see Helleiner, "Outward Orientation," pp. 146ff. It is impossible to tell from these aggregate calculations whether the difference between the sample of 24 low-income economies-17 of them in Sub-Saharan Africa-and the sample of 23 African economies was because the former sample included six Asian countries, or because it excluded Senegal, Zambia, Ghana, Liberia, Mauritania, Angola, and Kenya, most of which have experienced severe fluctuations in imports and/or exceptionally low rates of agricultural growth. Back.
Note 7: Also see Wheeler, "Sources of Stagnation;" Reginald Green and Stephanie Griffith-Jones, "Africa's External Debt" in Rose, ed., Crisis and Recovery. Back.
Note 8: Uma Lele and Wilfred Candler, "Food Security: Some East African Considerations," in A. Valdes, ed., Food Security for Developing Countries (Boulder: Westview, 1981); Frank Ellis, "Agricultural Price Policy in Tanzania," World Development 10, 4 (1982): 263-283. Back.
Note 9: See Michael Bratton, The Local Politics of Rural Development (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1980); Johan Pottier, Migrants No More: Settlement and Survival in Mambwe Villages, Zambia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). Back.
Note 10: World Bank, Financing Development. Back.
Note 11: See Kenneth Good, "Systematic Agricultural Mismanagement: The 1985 'Bumper' Harvest in Zambia," Journal of Modern African Studies 24, 1 (1986): 257-284, on Zambia's disastrous experience with a bumper maize crop in 1985, a third or more of which rotted or went unconsumed because of chaos in the marketing system. Back.
Note 12: See, for example, Nigeria's program of austerity, which began in 1986 with World Bank but no IMF funds; consult Thomas M. Callaghy, "Lost Between State and Market: The Politics of Economic Adjustment in Ghana, Zambia, and Nigeria" in Joan Nelson, ed., Economic Crisis and Policy Choice: The Politics of Economic Adjustment in the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 257-319. Tanzania also adopted many of the policies advocated by the IMF in the early 1980s, while at the same time failing to reach an agreement with the Fund and therefore receiving no credits; see Reginald Green, "Political-Economic Adjustment and Conditionality: Tanzania, 1974-81," in John Williamson, ed., IMF Conditionality (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1983). Tanzania subsequently signed agreements with both the Fund and the Bank; see the Lofchie chapter in this volume. Back.
Note 13: World Bank, Financing Adjustment, p. 19. Back.
Note 14: Resource poor farmers face uncertainty on many fronts. In addition to variations in weather, pest attacks, or market conditions, illness or other family troubles can also cause significant, unexpected changes in farm production. In a study of farming households in Embu, Kenya, for example, Haugerud found that, in the wake of a domestic dispute, angry wives or adult sons would typically leave the household, sometimes for weeks at a time. Since most small farms depended almost entirely on household labor, domestic discord was a major source of poor yields due to disruption of labor supplies; see Angelique Haugerud, "Economic Differentiation among Peasant Households: A Comparison of Embu Coffee and Cotton Zones," IDS Working Paper No. 383, Institute for Development Studies, Nairobi, 1981; and "Household Dynamics and Rural Political Economy among Embu Farmers in the Kenya Highlands," Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1984. Back.
Note 15: See, for example, Thomas Reardon, P. Matlon and C. Delgado, "Coping with Household-Level Food Insecurity in Drought-Affected Areas of Burkina Faso," World Development 16, 4 (1988): 1065-1074. Back.
Note 16: Good, "Systematic Agricultural Mismanagement," p. 268. Back.
Note 17: Andrew Shepard, "Agrarian Change in Northern Ghana: Public Investment, Capitalist Farming, and Famine" in J. Heyer, et. al., Rural Development in Tropical Africa (New York: St. Martins, 1981). Back.
Note 18: Professor Jane Guyer, personal communication. Back.
Note 19: For an example of fluctuations in government employment, see John Ayoade, "States Without Citizens: An Emerging African Phenomenon," in Naomi Chazan and Donald Rothchild, eds., Precarious Balance: State and Society in Africa (Boulder: Westview, 1988). Back.
Note 20: John Bruce, "A Perspective on Indigenous Land Tenure Systems and Land Concentration" in R. Downs and S. Reyna, eds., Land and Society in Contemporary Africa (Durham, NH: University Press of New England, 1988); Paul Bohannon, "Land, 'Tenure' and Land Tenure," in D. Biebuyck, ed., African Agrarian Systems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963); John Cohen, "Land Tenure and Rural Development in Africa" in Robert Bates and Michael Lofchie, eds., Agricultural Development in Africa (New York: Praeger, 1980); Gershon Feder and Raymond Noronha, "Land Rights Systems and Agricultural Development in Sub-Saharan Africa," World Bank Research Observer 2, 1 (1987): 143-170. Back.
Note 21: A. G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (London: Longmans, 1973). Back.
Note 22: Paul Collier goes so far as to suggest that interlinked transactions in land, labor and/or credit, so common in rural Asia, do not exist in Kenya; "Malfunctioning of African Rural Factor Markets: Theory and a Kenyan Case," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics7nbsp;45, 2 (1983): 141-171. Back.
Note 23: Ibid.; Feder and Noronha, "Land Rights Systems." Back.
Note 24: Recommended reforms range from full privatization of land ownership, agricultural production, and rural trade to state ownership and collective production, depending on the author's political preferences. Back.
Note 25: Sara Berry, "Social Institutions and Access to Resources in African Agriculture," Africa 59, 1 (1989). Back.
Note 26: Paul Lovejoy, "Plantations in the Economy of the Sokoto Caliphate," Journal of African History 19, 3 (1978): 341-368. Back.
Note 27: Matt Schaffer, Mandinko: The Ethnography of a West African Holy Land (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980). Back.
Note 28: Norman Klein, "The Two Asantes: Competing Interpretations of 'Slavery' in Akan-Asante Culture" in Paul Lovejoy, ed., The Ideology of Slavery (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1981). Back.
Note 29: Charles Ambler, Kenyan Communities in the Age of Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). Back.
Note 30: John Comaroff, "Bridewealth and the Control of Ambiguity in a Tswana Chiefdom" in J. Comaroff, ed., The Meaning of Marriage Payments (London: Academic Press, 1980); Colin Murray, Families Divided (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Francis Snyder, Capitalism and Legal Change: An African Transformation (New York: Academic Press, 1981). Back.
Note 31: Colonial administrators' relations with European enterprises in Africa were, accordingly, somewhat contradictory. Administrators depended on European firms and settlers to generate taxable revenue, but they were also potentially in competition with private firms for labor and essential supplies. See Jane Guyer, "The Food Economy and French Colonial Rule in Central Cameroon," Journal of African History 19, 4 (1978): 577-597. Back.
Note 32: I have developed this argument at length in an unpublished paper, "Hegemony On A Shoestring: Some Unintended Consequences of Colonial Rule for African Farmers' Access to Resources." Back.
Note 33: Michael Crowder, West Africa Under Colonial Rule (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1986). Back.
Note 34: Also, officials' search for information about traditional cultures invited multiple, often conflicting testimonies from local informants, without establishing any clear guidelines for selecting among them. In dealing with European administrators, Africans defined "tradition" to advance their interests vis-à-vis the colonial structure. Colonial officials were often aware that tradition could be invented, as well as recalled, but were inclined to attribute the practice to African venality or incompetence-not to the possibility that stable, homogeneous precolonial African cultures may never have existed. Back.
Note 35: David Anderson, "Depression, Dust Bowl, Demography and Drought," African Affairs 83, 332 (1984): 321-344; William Bienart, "Soil Erosion, Conservatism and Ideas about Development: A Southern African Exploration," Journal of Southern African Studies 11, 1 (1984): 52-81. Back.
Note 36: John Lonsdale and D. A. Low, eds., A History of East Africa, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). Back.
Note 37: See, for example, Richard Crook, "Decolonization, the Colonial State and Chieftancy in the Gold Coast," African Affairs 85 (1986): 75-105. Back.
Note 38: Of course, the state sector grew after independence for political reasons, too; see Chazan and Rothchild, eds., Precarious Balance. Back.
Note 39: The view that the resulting structure of prices and domestic resource flows undercut agricultural development is a major part of the thinking underlying World Bank and IMF diagnoses of the African crisis and their recommendations for policy reform; see World Bank, Towards Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1981); and Financing Adjustment. Back.
Note 40: Jan Kees Van Donge, "Understanding Rural Zambia Today: The Rhodes-Livingstone Institute Revisited," Africa 55, 1 (1985): 60-75. On land reform in Kenya, see H.W.O. Okoth-Ogendo, "African Land Tenure Reform" in J. Heyer, et. al., Agricultural Development in Kenya (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976); Jack Glazier, Land and the Uses of Tradition Among the Mbeere of Kenya (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985); Angelique Haugerud, "The Consequences of Land Tenure Reform among Smallholders in the Kenya Highlands," Rural Africana 15/16 (1983): 65-90, and "Land Tenure and Agrarian Change in Kenya," Africa 59, 1 (1989). On rural consequences of the Nigerian Land Use Decree, see Paul Francis, "Power and Order: A Study of Litigation in a Yoruba Community," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Liverpool, 1981, and " 'For the Use and Common Benefit of All Nigerians:' Consequences of the 1978 Land Nationalization," Africa 54, 3 (1984): 5-28. On IRDPs, see Michael Watts, Silent Violence (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1983); Judith Carney, "Struggles Over Crop Rights and Labour Within Contract Farming Households in a Gambian Irrigated Rice Project," Journal of Peasant Studies 15, 3 (1988): 334-349; Adrian Adams,"The Senegal River Valley" in Heyer, Rural Development. Back.
Note 41: Jacques Weber, "Types de surproduit et formes d'accumulation" in ORSTOM, Essais sur la Reproduction de Formations Sociales Dominées (Paris: ORSTOM, 1977). Back.
Note 42: For citations, see Sara Berry, "Property Rights and Rural Resource Management: The Case of Tree Crops in West Africa," Cahiers des Sciences Humaines 24, 1 (1988): 3-16, and "Social Institutions." Back.
Note 43: Terence Ranger and Eric Hobsbawn, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Back.
Note 44: Reardon, et. al., "Coping." Back.
Note 45: John Cleave, African Farmers (New York: Praeger, 1974); Kenneth Swindell, Farm Labor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Back.
Note 46: Sara Berry, Fathers Work for Their Sons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Polly Hill, Migrant Cocoa Farmers of Southern Ghana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963); Roger Southall, "Farmers, Traders and Brokers in the Gold Coast Economy," Canadian Journal of African Studies 12, 2 (1978): 185-211; Paul Clough, "Farmers and Traders in Hausaland," Development and Change 12 (1981): 273-292; Mahir Saul, "The Organization of a West African Grain Market," American Anthropologist 89 (1987): 74-95; Jannik Boesen and A. T. Mohele, The "Success Story" of Peasant Tobacco Production in Tanzania (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1979). Back.
Note 47: Brian Schwimmer, "The Organization of Migrant Farmer Communities in Southern Ghana," Canadian Journal of African Studies 14, 2 (1980): 221-238; Elizabeth Colson and Thayer Scudder, For Prayer and Profit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Berry, Fathers. Back.
Note 48: William Watson, Tribal Cohesion in a Money Economy7nbsp;(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958). Back.
Note 49: Johan Pottier, "Defunct Labour Reserve? Mambwe Villages in the Post-Migration Economy," Africa 53, 2 (1983): 2-23, and Migrants No More. Back.
Note 50: Pottier, "Defunct Labour Reserve?" p. 2. Back.
Note 51: Returned migrants often avoided going back to their home villages, however, since they had few savings with which to reestablish themselves there, and knew what little they had would be immediately absorbed by relatives even poorer than they; see Pottier, "Defunct Labour Reserve?" and Migrants No More. Back.
Note 52: Pottier, "Defunct Labour Reserve?" p. 17. Back.
Note 53: See Shepard, "Agrarian Change;" Jean-Pierre Chauveau, Jacques Richard, and J.-P. Dozon, "Histoire de Riz, Histoire d'Igname," Africa 51, 2 (1981). Back.
Note 54: Opportunities for self-employment grew rapidly in other tertiary activities. To cite one example, the motor repair industry grew at a phenomenal rate during the 1970s, as oil revenues brought in a flood of imported vehicles, which wore down Nigeria's roads faster than the government could repair them or build new ones. This, in turn, created a booming market for the services of mechanics, panel beaters, vulcanizers, battery chargers, and a host of other specialities, whose buoyancy and low barriers to entry attracted many farmers' sons. See Berry, Fathers, chapter 6. Back.
Note 55: This is a complex issue, depending not only on differences in urban and rural investment opportunities, but also on struggles over control of labor and income within rural households and communities. See, for example, Murray, Families Divided; Andrew Spiegel, "Rural Differentiation and the Diffusion of Migrant Labour Remittances in Lesotho" in P. Mayer, ed., Black Villagers in an Industrial Society (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1980); Jean-Yves Weigel, Migration et production domestique des Soninkes du Sénégal (Paris: ORSTOM Travaux et Documents, 1982). Back.
Note 56: Megan Vaughan, Story of an African Famine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) Back.
Note 57: Angelique Haugerud, personal communication. The International Potato Center (CIP), headquartered in Lima, Peru, is part of the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research, the international network of agricultural research institutes concerned with developing appropriate improved technologies for Third World farming systems. Back.
Note 58: Louise Fresco, Cassava and Shifting Cultivation in Africa (Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute, 1986); R. Weber, et. al. Inter-Cropping with Cassava (Ottawa: IDRC, 1979), and Cassava Cultural Practices (Ottawa: IDRC, 1980). Back.
Note 59: Michael Johnny, J. Karimu, and P. Richards, "Upland and Swamp Rice Farming Systems in Sierra Leone: the Social Context of Technological Change," Africa 51, 2 (1981): 531-579; Margaret Haswell, The Changing Pattern of Economic Activity in a Gambian Village (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1963); Olga Linares, "From Tidal Swamp to Inland Valley: On the Social Organization of Wet Rice Cultivation among the Diola of Senegal," Africa 51, 2 (1981): 557-595. Back.
Note 60: Paul Richards, Coping with Hunger (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986); J. P. Dozon, "Transformation et Reproduction d'une Société Rurale Africaine dans le Cadre de l'Economie de Plantation: Le Cas des Bete de la Région de Gagnoa" in ORSTOM, Essai sur la Reproduction; Olga Linares, "Farming Decisions and Household Composition: the Cultural Context of Production among the Jola of Senegal," paper prepared for a conference on African households and Farming Systems, Bellagio, Italy, 1984; and "From Tidal Swamp." Back.
Note 61: Johnny et. al., "Upland and Swamp Rice." Back.
Note 62: Chauveau et. al., "Histoire de Riz."; Dozon, "Transformation et Reproduction." Back.
Note 63: For a review of recent literature on cassava cultivation and its role in socioeconomic change in Africa, see Sara Berry, "Socio-Economic Aspects of Cassava Cultivation in Africa," paper prepared for the Rockefeller Foundation, 1986. Back.
Note 64: Christine Jones, "Intrahousehold Bargaining in Response to the Introduction of New Crops: A Case Study from North Cameroon" in J. L. Moock, ed., Understanding Africa's Rural Households and Farming Systems (Boulder: Westview, 1986); Carney, "Struggles Over Crop Rights." Back.
Note 65: Fresco, Cassava. Back.
Note 66: Richards, Coping with Hunger; Christine Okali and Sara Berry, "Alley Farming in West Africa in Comparative Perspective," Boston University African-American Issues Center Discussion Paper No. 1. Back.
Note 67: David Norman, "Rationalising Mixed Cropping under Indigenous Conditions," Journal of Development Studies 11, 1 (1974): 3-21. Back.
Note 68: George Abalu, "A Note on Crop Mixtures under Indigenous Conditions in Northern Nigeria," Journal of Development Studies 12, 3 (1976): 212-220; Deryke Belshaw, "Taking Indigenous Knowledge Seriously: The Case of Inter-Cropping in East Africa" in David Brokensha, et. al., Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Development (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1986); Fresco, Cassava. Back.
Note 69: Fresco, Cassava, pp. 107-108. Back.
Note 70: Professor Jane Guyer, personal communication. Back.
Note 71: Others, such as livestock, form an important part of the capital stock in many African farming systems, but to do justice to the extensive literature on agro-pastoralism in Sub-Saharan Africa is beyond the scope of this chapter. Back.
Note 72: Pottier, "Defunct Labour Reserve?" and Migrants No More; Shepard,"Agrarian Change;" Berry, Fathers. Back.
Note 73: Weigel, Migration et Production; Richards, Coping with Hunger; Sally Falk Moore, Social Facts and Fabrications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Paul Ross, "Land as a Right to Membership: Land Tenure Dynamics in a Peripheral Zone" in Michael Watts ed., State, Oil and Agriculture in Nigeria (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, 1986). Back.
Note 74: Berry, Fathers. Back.
Note 75: Glazier, Land and the Uses of Tradition, p. 183; Apollo Njonjo, "The Africanization of the 'White Highlands': A Study of Agrarian Class Struggle in Kenya, 1950-1974," Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1977; Fiona Mackenzie, "Land and Territory: The Interface between Two Systems of Land Tenure, Murang'a District, Kenya," Africa7nbsp;59, 1 (1989). Back.
Note 76: For an extreme case, see John Sharp and Andrew Spiegel, "Vulnerability to Impoverishment in South African Rural Areas: The Erosion of Kinship and Neighborhood as Social Resources," Africa 46, 2 (1986): 133-152. Back.
Note 77: Carney, "Struggles Over Crop Rights;" Pauline Peters, "Struggles Over Water, Struggles Over Meaning: Cattle, Water and the State in Botswana," Africa 54, 3 (1984): 24-29. Back.
Note 78: Claude Raynaut, "Transformation du Syst¸me de Production et Inégalité Economique: Le Cas d'un Village Haoussa (Niger)," Canadian Journal of African Studies 10, 2 (1976): 279-306; Watts, Silent Violence; David Norman, M. Newman and I. Ouedraogo, The Farmer in the Semi-Arid Tropics of West Africa (Hyderabad: ICRISAT, 1981). Back.
Note 79: Ross, "Land as a Right." Back.
Note 80: Collier and Lal, Labour and Poverty. Back.
Note 81: Haswell, Changing Pattern; Richards, Coping with Hunger; Johnny et. al., "Upland and Swamp Rice;" Linares,"From Tidal Swamp;" Berry Fathers; Francis, Power and Order; Julian Clarke, "Peasantization and Landholding: A Nigerian Case Study" in M. Lofchie and S. Commins, eds., Africa's Agrarian Crisis (Boulder: Rienner, 1980); Christine Okali, Cocoa and Kinship in Ghana: The Matrilineal Akan (London: Kegan Paul, 1983); Chauveau, "Economie de Plantation." Back.
Email this citation