Economic Development

Abdella Mohammed Ahmed (M.Sc.), 2024

If the migration of people with and without school certificates to the cities of Africa, Asia, and Latin America is proceeding at historically unprecedented rates, a large part of the explanation can be found in the economic stagnation of the out¬lying rural areas. That is where the people are. Over 2.5 billion people in the Third World grind out a meager and often inadequate existence in agricultural pursuits. Over 3 billion people lived in rural areas in 1997. This figure will rise to almost 3.3 billion by the year 2010.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

2007

This paper provides a nuanced perspective on debates about the potential for Africa's smallholder agriculture to stimulate growth and alleviate poverty in an increasingly integrated world. In particular, the paper synthesizes both the traditional theoretical literature on agriculture's role in the development process and discusses more recent literature that remains skeptical about agriculture's development potential for Africa. In order to examine in greater detail the relevance for Africa of both the "old" and "new" literatures on agriculture, the paper provides a typology of African countries based on their stage of development, agricultural conditions, natural resources, and geographic location. This typology shows that agriculture's growth and poverty-reduction potential varies substantially across the continent. Moreover, the typology provides the framework for in-depth analysis of agriculture and growth-poverty linkages in five countries (Ethiopia, Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zambia) using economy-wide, macro-micro linkage models.

1 Interested readers are referred to a special issue of Agricultural Economics (Vol. 39 supplement, December 2008), for an excellent set of articles reviewing the state of knowledge on the causes and consequences of the recent global food price crises.

This is a study of farm dynamics in eight African countries, drawing on a sample of more than 3000 farm households. It deals mainly with food crops and in detail with maize and makes a longitudinal analysis by systematically comparing current conditions with those obtaining when the farm was set up under its present management. From the study emerges an overall picture of inadequately exploited production potentials where farmers' commercial energies are driven towards other food crops than grains, especially vegetables for urban markets.

DSGD discussion …, 2004

This paper draws together findings from different elements of a research project examining critical components of pro-poor agricultural growth and of policies that can promote such growth in poor rural economies in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Agricultural growth, a critical driver in poverty reducing growth in many poor agrarian economies in the past, faces many difficulties in today's poor rural areas in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Some of these difficulties are endogenous to these areas while others result from broader processes of global change. Active state interventions in 'kick starting' markets in 20 th century green revolutions suggest that another major difficulty may be current policies which emphasize the benefits of liberalization and state withdrawal but fail to address critical institutional constraints to market and economic development in poor rural areas.

2019

Chapter 4 Agriculture, Rural Poverty and Income Inequality in sub-Saharan Africa / 79 generating foreign exchange earnings and driving economic growth. e second is that agriculture can serve as the linchpin of Industrialisation. e third is the sharp rise in food prices that started in 2008 and their persistence even during the period of primary commodity busts, which challenged the dire need to meet the hunger targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the rising need to feed the rapidly growing urban population. Finally, the cases of China and India, where the successful implementation of strategies that focus on smallholders in the commercialisation of agriculture helped reduce poverty and, to some extent, inequality, present a strong argument in favour of investing in agriculture to drive economic development. It is becoming increasingly clear that promoting an agriculture-for-development agenda is vital to achieve the SDGs in SSA, given the following: the sheer size of the agricultural sector, on which about three-quarters of the economically active depend; rural poverty of over 50 per cent in at least 33 countries; and that agriculture is the largest user of natural resources. is chapter examines how agriculture has helped to shape poverty and inequality dynamics in Africa. To this end, the rest of the chapter is structured into four parts. Section 2 presents the current state of agriculture in Africa. Section 3 examines the relationship between agriculture, poverty and income inequality. Lessons for policy options are drawn in Section 4, while Section 5 concludes the chapter. 4.2 The current state of African agriculture e current state of agriculture in SSA can best be understood by observing the proportion of the population that depends on it for livelihood. e reservoir of labour employed by agriculture makes it critical for development. Agriculture accounts for 66.0 per cent of total employment in SSA (excluding South Africa). is is exceedingly high compared to other developing regions such as Central America (21.0 per cent) and East Asia (54.0 per cent), and globally (41.0 per cent) (Gollin, 2010). However, the continental average tends to hide some peculiarities. As a result of structural transformation in countries such as Seychelles, South Africa, Mauritius and Algeria, the share of agriculture in total employment is less than 20.0 per cent; in fact, it is less than 5.0 per cent in Seychelles and South Africa (UNDP, 2012; Odusola, forthcoming). However, due to the rural nature of the economies and the weight of agriculture in the overall GDP, agricultural employment dominates overall employment-at over 70.0 per cent-in Burundi,

Agricultural and food policy lies at the heart of many pressing societal issues today and economic analysis occupies a privileged place in contemporary policy debates. The global food price crises of 2008 and 2010 underscored the mounting challenge of meeting rapidly increasing food demand in the face of increasingly scarce land and water resources. The twin scourges of poverty and hunger quickly resurfaced as high-level policy concerns, partly because of food price riots and mounting insurgencies fomented by contestation over rural resources. Meanwhile, agriculture's heavy footprint on natural resources motivates heated environmental debates about climate change, water and land use, biodiversity conservation and chemical pollution. Agricultural technological change, especially associated with the introduction of genetically modified organisms, also introduces unprecedented questions surrounding intellectual property rights and consumer preferences regarding credence (i.e., unobservable by consumers) characteristics. Similar new agricultural commodity consumer behavior issues have emerged around issues such as local foods, organic agriculture and fair trade, even motivating broader social movements. Public health issues related to obesity, food safety, and zoonotic diseases such as avian or swine flu also have roots deep in agricultural and food policy. And agriculture has become inextricably linked to energy policy through biofuels production. Meanwhile, the agricultural and food economy is changing rapidly throughout the world, marked by continued consolidation at both farm production and retail distribution levels, elongating value chains, expanding international trade, and growing reliance on immigrant labor and information and communications technologies. In summary, a vast range of topics of widespread popular and scholarly interest revolve around agricultural and food policy and economics. The extensive list of prospective authors, titles and topics offers a partial, illustrative listing. Thus a series of topical volumes, featuring cutting-edge economic analysis by leading scholars has considerable prospect for both attracting attention and garnering sales. This series will feature leading global experts writing accessible summaries of the best current economics and related research on topics of widespread interest to both scholarly and lay audiences.

Journal of Agrarian Change, 2014

Despite the Millenium Development Goals and the global interest in trying to guarantee food security for all, the African continent is still suffering chronic food shortages. At any given time, several Sub-Saharan countries have difficulties meeting their populations' food demands for want of a stable production system, but essentially because of a lack of political stability. The global food crisis is deepening, as climate change leads to stagnating ordeclining agricultural productivity, as shortages of fertile land and water inhibit the expansion of production that should follow growing population trends, and as growing demand for biofuel increases the competition for land. Given these extreme circumstances, agricultural development and food security are, or ought to be, back at the top of the development agenda. Increasingly, both sovereign and private investors have set their sights on the African continent which still has abundant, and as yet unexploited, land reserves, as a potential source of global food and other agricultural commodities. This growing interest in African land has brought with it competing approaches on how to tap into the continent's agricultural potential. On the one hand, there are those domestic and foreign actors who want to see agricultural transition and transformation along the lines of Western Europe, the USA, and other major agricultural exporting countries the emphasis here is on investment in advanced industrial agriculture, mechanization and use of chemical fertilizers, genetically modified organisms, and so on. On the other hand, there are domestic forces that see great potential in investing in small-scale farms, with an increased emphasis on environmentally sound production systems that follow agro-ecological approaches aimed at meeting household food security. The proponents of this latter 'small is beautiful' approach regard the over emphasis on industrial agriculture as a threat to the existence of small-scale famers, and to the land and water resources on which they rely. However, the discussion as to which of these approaches is best, does not adequately address the root causes of the productivity crisis in agriculture. Most, if not all, key blockages to realizing ambitious development goals indeed lie in political and institu-