The Hardest Case - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 133

As much as a third of tropical Africa remains underexploited because of the presence of
trypanosomiasis, a parasitic disease that affects both people and livestock.
All these difficult natural conditions might seem to give African governments ample
excuse for not investing more public resources in agricultural development. Yet the con-
straints mentioned here do not have to block agricultural improvements in Africa. As
global wealth has grown and the frontier of science has moved outward, the ability of
human institutions to engineer an escape from natural constraint has expanded as well,
so that geography and climate no longer have to be destiny. For example, many of the
most productive lands in tropical Brazil today were considered unusable for crop farm-
ing two decades ago, before they were limed to correct soil acidity. Africa could be doing
much better in working against natural constraints if governments in the region were
willing to invest more in essential public goods such agricultural research and rural
infrastructure. Public research and development expenditures can raise productivity in
almost any environment (Masters and Wiebe 2000). Economic returns to agricultural
research tend to be high, and even in Africa rates of return above 50 percent are not
unusual. Yet most governments in the region have long skimped on public spending for
agricultural science (Alston, Pardey, and Roseboom 1998). Investments in rural infra-
structure can also increase farm productivity. Spending on rural roads in Uganda has
better than a 9 to 1 ratio of benefits (in terms of agricultural growth and rural poverty
reduction), yet once again Africa's governments have tended to put priorities elsewhere
(World Bank 2007). Investments in agricultural biotechnology could bring to Africa
crops more capable of withstanding abiotic stress, such as nitrogen deficits or drought.
Ethnic Diversity, Corruption,
and Conflict
A second explanation for the tendency of African governments to invest so little in agri-
cultural development is borrowed from critiques of the African state that go far beyond
the farming sector. In every economic sector, it can be argued, African governments do
a poor job of providing public goods. Public resources are used not for investment but
for patronage to favored clans and ethnic groups, or to buy elections, or to equip and
ensure the loyalty of armed forces, or simply to enrich the head of government, his party,
and his extended family members. his tendency of African governments to shift, over
time, from providing public goods that might sustain economic growth to providing
private goods that only redistribute the growth, to finally becoming predatory and actu-
ally seizing private goods, has been described most systematically and most recently by
Robert Bates of Harvard University (Bates 2008).
Democratic governance has been spreading in Africa since the early 1990s, and in
that time the region has gone from almost no democracies to nearly half the continent
under democratic rule. Significantly, there are no signs that this trend is reversing. Of