Rural household sources of income, livelihoods strategies and institutional constraints in different commodity contexts - Institutional Constraints to Small Farmer Development in Southern Africa - page 27

7. Insufficient access to profitable markets to sell farm output.
8. Infrastructure deficiencies in both institutional and physical terms (Toenniessen et al. , 2008).
The foregoing views invariably blame human actions of one type or the other for the
unrelenting hunger and poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. In some cases, the problems have
arisen from improper actions, namely those that lead to exploitation of scarce resources and
result in inefficiencies. In other cases, actions that would have led to desirable outcomes
are not taken at all. Again, some of the problems have resulted from failures to adequately
regulate human actions which lead to outcomes that could have been avoided. A number
of institutional and structural theorists, including Barley and Tolbert (1997) and Myint
(2003), have shown that 'institutions and actions are inextricably linked'. The consensus
of these theorists is that it is human action that creates, maintains and alters institutions.
To that extent, we can safely say that all the identified causes of hunger and poverty in
Africa are traceable to institutional capacity to the extent that they lead to political neglect,
representing varying degrees of government failure which may easily be the most potent
of these causes given that it affects all the other elements. As Anne Krueger noted several
years ago, 'in many developing countries, government policies have been highly distortive
and harmful to economic growth' (Krueger, 1990). In the context of an assessment
of institutional constraints to smallholder development on the continent, the role of
government will obviously rank very high.
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
develop agricultural production in the communal areas of South Africa is the use of low
level technology among the farmers in the former 'independent homelands' of the country
where inadequate infrastructure, knowledge and skills constrain the use of improved inputs
and methods in farming (Van Schalkwyk et al. , 2004). A similar point has been made for
several sub-Saharan African countries, including Swaziland (Magagula and Faki, 1999;
Mashinini, 2004; and Mkhabela and Mashinini, 2005). The situation has persisted despite
the large amount of research efforts and results currently available and the indisputable
evidence of the important role of improved technologies in agricultural development.
2.2 Household sources of income
Income diversification into non-farm activities has come to be recognised as typical practice
among rural households (Barrett et al., 2001). Analyses of rural livelihoods in Africa,
Asia, and Latin America, show that rural households derive a significant proportion of
their livelihoods from non-farm employment (NFE) (Adams, 1999; Barrett et al., 2001;
Escobal, 2001; Fraser et al., 2003 and Otsuka and Yamano, 2006). The rural non-farm