The apparent weak dynamics of food crops can be explained, for some, by an “urban bias” (Lipton, 1977). In order to feed the cities, the public marketing boards (e.g. ONCAD in Senegal) have become enormous bureaucracies. Thus, in the face of administered prices set at low levels, parallel markets have developed whose main beneficiaries are commercial intermediaries. The use of imports in a context of low international prices leads to competition with local producers and a strong deprotection of agriculture.
However, we have shown that this “urban bias” thesis is debatable and that we should beware of false evidence. The most urbanized African countries have the highest relative producer prices (see Hugon et al., 1991). Their agriculture is subject to price and volume instability. It is the least urbanized African countries that are relatively the most dependent on food imports or food aid and those with the lowest agricultural value added per rural. These results are confirmed by the work of J.M. Cour (1994) and WALTPS (1994).
African urbanization, which takes a variety of forms, has not generally led to a break in urban-rural links for several reasons. Agents belong to networks that go beyond the city/countryside dichotomy. Urban agglomerations are places where exchanges intensify. The city is not only a place where agricultural surpluses are extracted, it is above all a place where wealth is created through the division of labor and the market and where solvent demand is created. In the city, there is diversity and non-uniformity of diets, which are at once superimposed, confronted and have their own dynamics. The examples always cited of bread or rice, to characterize mimetic models, must therefore be put into perspective. We note a relative ruralization of food consumption patterns (Requier-Desjardins, 1989).
In the last ten years, the parallelism of food deficits and urban explosions in sub-Saharan Africa has been broken. In 1982-1984, cereal imports fed 50 percent of the African urban population. However, the percentage fell to 32/33 percent in 1985-86 and 1990.
A relative loss of competitiveness of export agriculture
Export agriculture is still dominated by small farms. It is often a pick-your-own economy with low yields. Marketing and processing are often deficient. Prices are unstable. All products are exported with little domestic value added.
African agricultural export products face strong competition from new exporters (bananas, cloves, vanilla, tea, tobacco, coffee) or from synthetic or substitute products (vanilla, groundnuts, rubber). In plantation economy regions, there are complementarities between food crops and export crops.
In the past, agricultural export sectors have been very successful: cocoa, coffee, palm, rubber and especially cotton. Cash crops had grown strongly due to favorable prices (stabilized overprices), management structures (large plantations with employees, incentives for small producers) and marketing and stabilization boards (e.g., the Cocoa Marketing Board in Ghana). These different factors have diminished as Africa has faced international competition. The relative stability of prices in a context of both favorable and unstable international prices played a positive role in the 1960s and 1970s. However, this situation was reversed in the 1980s. International prices fell for a long period before rising again from 1992-93 and becoming more unstable. The internal stabilization mechanisms have experienced major deficits and malfunctions. The major commodity chains lost competitiveness in a context of increasing global competition: cocoa, coffee, palm oil.
Prices have had little incentive and little stability. We can consider that there is an asymmetry between food crops and export crops. The former have tended to develop at the expense of the latter, while, with rare exceptions (groundnuts in Senegal, beans in Burkina Faso), the development of export crops has tended to benefit food crops. Thus, the cotton sector plays a role in driving food crops in rural areas.
The changes underway
African agriculture is facing major challenges:
Demographic pressure is increasing despite rural emigration. Pioneer fronts are multiplying. However, extensive farming methods continue to dominate;
Imperial, then European, preferences are eroding and countries have implemented liberalization and exchange rate adjustment policies aimed at accepting world price signals and improving the competitiveness of agriculture;
The administered economy and the theoretically stabilizing and in fact preventive mechanisms are being reduced in a context of liberalization;
There is a limitation of available land. “The time of finite space is beginning”, writes J. Giri, and a process of private appropriation is underway;
The main changes concern intensification, specialization with respect to markets, the development of quasi-salariation and a change in the distribution of income and ownership of factors (Pourcet, 1996).
African farmers often reject the global “technological package” of development agencies in favor of more autonomous innovations that ease bottlenecks. But innovations are costly, credit is absent or usurious, and female labor remains the most profitable “factor of production. The work of Ostrom (1992) has shown that the management of agricultural systems through appropriate practices and rules is generally more efficient than large integrated perimeters imposed from above.
Source: Phillipe Hugon – Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa in its institutional environment