The Hardest Case - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 130

Why Don't African Governments Act
to Boost Farm Productivity?
Governments in Africa have opportunities to address these problems of agricultural
stagnation. They could follow the lead of governments in Asia and invest more in rural
public goods, such as roads, power, irrigation, schools, clinics, and agricultural research.
This would gradually transform Africa's countryside from a poverty trap into a produc-
tivity and income center, yet governments in Africa have been slow to take this approach.
Nearly all public investments needed for increased agricultural productivity have been
underprovided in Africa. Rural road systems in Africa are primitive, with 70 percent of
all rural citizens living more than a 30-minute walk from the nearest all-weather road
(Sebastian 2007). There is virtually no rural electrical power, rural health clinics are
sparse and poorly equipped, and rural education is rudimentary (a majority of farmers
in Africa, who tend to be women, cannot read or write in any language). In addition,
public investments in agricultural research are miniscule. Two-thirds or more of all citi-
zens in Africa depend on farming for income and employment, yet governments con-
tinue to devote an average of just 5 or 6 percent of their annual budget spending on any
kind of agricultural development. In many cases, this percentage has actually declined.
Whereas the government of Uganda devoted 10 percent of its budget to agriculture in
1980, since 1991 agriculture has not received more than 3 percent of the budget in any
year, and in some years the share has been below 2 percent (Oxford Policy Management
2007). The Government of India, during the early years of the Green Revolution, was
devoting more than 20 percent of its budget to agricultural development (Hazell 2009).
Good governance in the area of agricultural development often comes down to an
adequate allocation of budget resources for that purpose, and African political lead-
ers know they are spending too little. In 2003, at an African Union meeting in Maputo,
Africa's heads of government pledged to increase their share of the national public bud-
get that went to the agricultural sector up to at least 10 percent by 2008. But a subsequent
survey of forty-five countries in the region by the International Food Policy Research
Institute (IFPRI) found that only eight of those countries had met the pledge (Fan,
Omilola, and Lambert 2009).
Many governments in the developing world have a history of “urban bias” in the pol-
icy choices they make, for reasons originally pointed out by Michael Lipton in his clas-
sic study, Why Poor People Stay Poor (Lipton 1977). Rural populations in all developing
countries find it harder to make effective political demands on the state because they
are more difficult to organize for political action, being more isolated from each other,
more distant from the capital city, less well educated, and typically unarmed. By con-
trast, urban populations are often already organized—into unions, a civil service work-
force, and armed military or police units. Urban dwellers are also far better educated
and politically informed. They may be fewer in number than rural dwellers, but they are
physically proximate to the institutions of the state and to each other. They can threaten