Rural household sources of income, livelihoods strategies and institutional constraints in different commodity contexts - Institutional Constraints to Small Farmer Development in Southern Africa - page 25

2. Rural household sources of income, livelihoods strategies and
institutional constraints in different commodity contexts
Simbarashe Ndhleve, Bridget Jari, Lovemore Musemwa and Ajuruchukwu Obi
Abstract
A substantial amount of research has been carried out globally and in South Africa on the
socioeconomic circumstances of rural households and the strategies they adopt to deal with
their daily realities of poverty, unemployment, food shortage, among others. Increasingly,
the links are being made between these issues and the institutional environment in
which smallholders operate. A useful analysis of the role of institutions in smallholder
development must begin with an understanding of the existing livelihoods and patterns
of socioeconomic participation. In Southern Africa, it is still being debated how roles for
rural incomes and employment are split between farm and non-farm activities. Since this
has important implications for the focus of public policy and for the pattern and extent of
institutional development for poverty alleviation, it is important to examine this element
and gain an understanding of the current status as well as the trends. This chapter reviews
the broad development literature on income earning strategies of rural households, the
motivations for diversification into different activities and the determinants of participation
in these activities. The chapter further presents a review of the literature on the institutional
constraints faced by smallholder and emerging farmers in general and the smallholders and
communities participating in the production and marketing of the indigenous Nguni cattle
in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, given its importance in the rural economy.
2.1 Introduction and problem context
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 Latin America and Asia. Nweke et al. (2002) re-affirmed these observations and
showed that the low adoption rates for improved technologies remain a serious obstacle to
fighting hunger on the continent. Back in the 1980s, analysts, notably Eicher (1982), and
Lele (1984) noted that 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. According to Southgate et al. (2007), agricultural
production per capita in Africa may have declined by as much as 6% in 1981, and by about