Innovation In African Agriculture

Arthur J. Dommen

• Editore: CRC Press
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429713507
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Biological Sciences
• Categoria: Biology

This book looks at the input-output relations of low-resource agriculture in Africa and shows how the intensification process through the application of modern technologies can work successfully to raise productivity and to sustain production over the long term.

PART ONE
Efficiency

Introduction to Part One

Since the publication in 1964 of Theodore W. Schultz's Transforming Traditional Agriculture, economists have generally accepted the thesis that farmers engaged in traditional agriculture are producing at high levels of efficiency, measured by marginal returns to resources in alternative uses. An important corollary of this thesis has been that significant increases in output cannot be obtained by reallocating existing resources, but only through technological change that fundamentally restructures the productivities of these resources. The success of the Green Revolution in Asia and Latin America in diffusing high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice developed by international research centers seemed to offer convincing empirical proof of the correctness of the Schultz thesis.

Nevertheless, Sub-Saharan Africa has so far not followed this technology-based path to agricultural development. African farmers, it seems, have resisted adopting available new biological and mechanical technologies even though such technologies have demonstrated their "superiority." Is Africa's systematic failure to generate significant positive growth rates of agricultural, and in particular food, production per capita attributable to some flaw in these technologies, or to peculiarities in the way resources are used in African agriculture?

At first sight, African farmers appear to be anything but efficient. The following description by De Schlippe sums up the impression made on many Westerners by an African farm even today:

When one enters a Zande homestead for the first time, the impression is that of complete chaos. The courtyard is shapeless or roughly circular or oval. The huts in it are scattered. Crops, food and household belongings may lie about the courtyard, or be piled on to the veranda of a hut in what seems to be a most disorderly fashion. Worst of all, no fields can be seen. The thickets of plants surrounding the homestead seem as patchy and purposeless as any wild vegetation. It is impossible to distinguish a crop from a weed. It seems altogether incredible that a human intelligence should be responsible for this tangle.¹

But this impression is misleading, as will be shown. Most investigations of the efficiency of African farming have focused on the effect of technological innovation on farming patterns. Matlon and Newman, for instance, were concerned in their study of northern Nigerian farmers with the effect of income distribution on small farmers' abilities to adopt new technologies.² Such investigations have often thrown light on the sources of African farmers' efficiency in traditional production, so that it may be said with confidence that the Schultz thesis applies to African farmers. This book will be concerned with the effect of these sources of efficiency on technological innovation and its possibility, rather than the reverse.

Notes

1. Pierre de Schlippe, Shifting Cultivation in Africa: The Zande System of Agriculture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), p. 101.

2. Peter Matlon and Mark Newman, "Production Efficiency and the Distribution of Income Among Traditional African Farmers," African Rural Economy Working Paper, Michigan State University, mimeo, 1979.

1
Environment and Resources

In discussing low-resource agriculture in tropical Africa, it is necessary to relate the discussion to the physical environments which set the outer limits on how farmers organize resources for production. Two subcontinental agro-ecological zones will be distinguished in this book: the semi-arid tropics (SAT) zone and the tropical rain forest (TRF) zone. This is obviously too broad a scheme to satisfy many physical scientists. With the aim in mind of showing how African low-resource farmers behave in environments that are much too diverse to be captured by even the most detailed scheme, it will serve.

Agro-Ecological Zones

The TRF zone is characterized by high annual rainfall and rainfall distributed throughout the year. The natural vegetation is dense forest. This produces a growing environment in which nutrients are recycled rapidly, being released from decaying vegetable and animal matter by the activities of decomposer organisms and almost immediately being taken up by the roots of trees and other plants. Thus, while the tropical rain forest represents an extremely efficient system, the stock of nutrients remaining in the soil is not large. A main characteristic of the tropical rain forest is its richness of species, combined with a low population density of any single species. Agricultural cash crops are mainly tree crops like oil palm, cocoa, and coffee which make relatively small demands on the soil because the amount of nutrients removed from the ecosystem in harvesting is not large.¹

The SAT zone is characterized by seasonal amount and distribution of rainfall resulting in water regimes with marked rainy and dry seasons. These are of varied duration and intensity. The natural vegetation is grassland, with varying densities of scattered shrubs or trees, the ecological whole being described as savanna. The total content of available plant nutrients and bases in soils and ecosystems is small because soluble products of weathering and mineralization are readily and rapidly removed by leaching, soil structure is hardened by sunlight, and because nitrogen, sulfur, and other elements may be lost in fires. The basic food crops of the SAT are cereals, mainly sorghum, millet, and upland rice, supplemented by cowpeas, groundnuts, and other leguminous crops. These give way to starchy tubers, mainly yams and cassava, as the principal staple energy foods as one moves towards the TRF zone. Cotton is a major export crop of the SAT.²

Favorable Factors

Physical resources for agricultural production are not lacking in Africa. There is an abundant supply of land. Insolation in the SAT makes this zone potentially more productive of vegetable matter than most of Europe. Potential production of biomass at Samaru, northern Nigeria, is 2.8 times that at Rothamstead, England.³ Abundant rainfall in the TRF zone is favorable for plant growth. On the other hand, high insolation imposes high evaporation demands on plants and depletes soils of moisture rapidly. Rainfall in the SAT is variable. Most rain comes from convective storms, producing high soil erosion rates. But the SAT of Africa, while risky for agricultural productio...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE EFFICIENCY
• PART TWO DYNAMICS AND CHANGE
• PART THREE THE POPULATION QUESTION
• CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS
• Index