The Hardest Case - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 131

to block the streets, shut down commerce, or even take control of government minis-
tries, radio stations, and airports, so the state must give priority to their concerns.
Yet the urban bias of government policy in Africa is so extreme as to require more
than just these generic explanations, prompting a vigorous scholarly debate over why
so many governments in Africa invest so little in the improvement of agriculture. The
debate has not been resolved because so many of the alternative explanations are actu-
ally compatible with each other, suggesting that they all probably contribute to the
adverse political outcome. In the sections that follow we shall consider three categories
of such alternative but mutually reinforcing factors: demography and geography: eth-
nic diversity, conflict, and corruption; and colonial legacies plus various postcolonial
effects.
Demography and Geography
One school of thinking attributes the unique neglect of agricultural investments by
African governments to the unfortunate demographic and geographic destiny of the
continent. Africa has a rural population that is growing rapidly and demanding new
investments in farming, yet this population is not yet spatially dense enough to make the
needed investments cost-effective.In addition, Africa's geography—its limited coastline,
climate, topography, and soils—is often described as uniquely unpromising for produc-
tive farming, which further discourages government investment.
Population growth rates in Africa remain high (a dozen African countries still have
overall growth rates of 3 percent or higher), yet population densities in most countries
on the continent are quite low (less than half the global average) so relatively thin rural
populations often remain dispersed over wide areas. The expense of providing adequate
farming infrastructure—roads, power, and irrigation, and storage—to this highly dis-
persed rural population is more than most African governments can afford. One esti-
mate from the Commission for Africa calculated that meeting Africa's infrastructure
needs would require roughly a doubling of annual external assistance to the region, up
to a level of $14 billion (World Bank 2006). Because donors have not provided these
funds, and because the costs are so overwhelming, African governments have an excuse
to not even try.
The fact that some past efforts to build rural infrastructure in Africa were not
cost-effective provides another excuse. The large irrigation schemes constructed in the
1970s in the Volta Basin in West Africa cost an unaffordable $45,000 per hectare (Van
de Giesen et al. 2005). In 2010 the International Food Policy Research Institute esti-
mated the average internal rate of economic return in Africa on large-dam irrigation
projects was only 7 percent. Because projected economic rates of return are so low, the
average rate of expansion of irrigated area over the past thirty years in Africa was just
2.3 percent, actually slowing to just 1.1 percent per year during 2000-2003 period (You
et al. 2010).