Investigating institutional constraints to smallholder development: the issues and antecedents - Institutional Constraints to Small Farmer Development in Southern Africa - page 12

Eastern Cape, North West and Limpopo Provinces, still exhibit severe rural poverty levels
reminiscent of the old apartheid days and not much different from what obtains elsewhere
on the African continent.
The situation for the entire region is being worsened by the impact of HIV/AIDS which
is leading to unrelenting depletion of the human resource capacity in the region, more so
in the farm sector. The results of these studies were thus expected to contribute to policy
formulation on strategies to improve smallholder participation in the development process
through output expansion and enhanced market access. Implementation of such strategies
would contribute to poverty alleviation by providing more income to farmers. This should
have a positive effect on the economy as a whole, with special considerations being the
empowerment of women and other vulnerable groups.
Among the numerous problems of traditional agriculture, the prevalence of low-level
technology ranks very high. According to Spencer (1994), farmers in Africa have not widely
adopted the Green Revolution technologies that brought phenomenal improvements in yield
in America and Asia. As Lele (1984) noted, whatever increases occurred in the production
of the major cereals and root and tuber crops in Africa up to the early 1980s were as a result
of area expansion rather than improvements in the productivity per unit of input, or yield,
which results from technical change. In fact, agricultural production in general has been on
the decline for nearly three decades. It is estimated that agricultural production per capita
declined by some 22% between 1971 and 1984. By all accounts, sub-Saharan Africa is the
only region in the world where per capita agricultural growth has been declining over the
past four decades. In both Asia and Latin America, agricultural growth per capita began a
phenomenal growth from the mid-1970s and has remained positive since then.
This situation has continued to be a source of serious concern among policy makers and
researchers. Coincidentally, during the same period, African governments began to cut back
on expenditures devoted to agricultural technology development and transfer. According
to a review conducted in the late 1990s to assess the impacts and lessons in agricultural
technology development and transfer in Africa, the spending on agricultural technology
development and transfer had actually declined by as much as 37% over the 20 year-period
between 1971 and 1991 (Oehmke et al. , 1997). Since up to one-third of the growth in
agricultural productivity can be explained by past investments in agricultural research
(Oehmke et al. , 1997), there is no question that the observed decline in agricultural
production per capita can be attributed to underinvestment in research and development.
Reviewing the performance of traditional arable farming in the context of the Accelerated
Rainfed Arable Programme (ARAP) in Botswana, Seleka (1999) mentioned low adoption
of improved technologies as one of the 'sub-sectoral factors' implicated in the poor
performance of the country's arable agriculture. A key challenge identified in the effort to