The Hardest Case - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 134

the seventeen sub-Saharan African states that became democracies between 1990 and
1995, sixteen remain democracies today (Radelet 2010). Yet the governance failures that
most damage farming are not quickly corrected by introducing multiparty elections,
given the dominance of urban populations over election outcomes. Electoral competi-
tion can also have the unfortunate tendency of shortening the time horizon of govern-
ments, inspiring them to govern even more through short-term payoffs to supporters
rather than through long-term investments in growth (Bates 2008).
Why does this pattern arise more often in Africa than in the rest of the developing
world? Africa's extreme ethnic diversity is one candidate explanation. Many African
countries feature dozens of distinct ethnic groups, each with its own separate language
and regional homeland. Fourteen of the fifteen most ethnically diverse societies in the
world are located in Africa. By one count, sub-Saharan Africa has seventy-four differ-
ent ethnic minorities, compared to only forty-three in all of Asia, where the population
is much larger overall (Gurr 1993). In sub-Saharan Africa, minorities comprise 42 per-
cent of the population, versus the global average of 17 percent. In this environment of
incomplete national integration, governance patterns of mistrust, patronage, and the
formation of violent armed groups with distinct ethnic loyalties can displace nationwide
investments in any kind of public good.
Once ethnic group competition becomes militarized, as it often does in Africa, a more
extreme diversion of public resources away from public goods then becomes likely. If
actual fighting takes place, the agricultural sector is often the first to suffer. Violent con-
flict reduces agricultural productivity and compromises secure access to food in multi-
ple obvious ways. In rural farming communities, the recruitment of able-bodied young
men into armies and militias takes labor away from food production, thereby reduc-
ing rural incomes. In areas of conflict, predatory activities by both militias and regular
armies diminish food availability and access directly. These armed groups tend to sub-
sist by eating whatever they can take from the unarmed rural population, and they then
destroy any food they cannot use immediately in contested areas so as to deny it to their
adversaries. Fearing theft and destruction of this kind, rural dwellers naturally chose
to invest less energy in farming. They may abandon their land entirely and begin mov-
ing as internally displaced people toward cities or emergency feeding centers set up by
relief agencies. For all these reasons, countries experiencing conflict in Africa also tend
to experience significant drops in food production. They produce, on average, 12.4 per-
cent less food per capita in war years than in peacetime. A comparison of actual his-
torical food production in Africa after 1980 to a “peace adjusted trend” shows that peace
would have added 2-5 percent to the continent's total food production per year (Messer,
Cohen, and d'Costa 1998).
Because of frequent military conflict, many Africans are forced to cross national bor-
ders and become refugees, living in camps and depending for their survival on interna-
tional food aid. At one point in the 1990s, while sub-Saharan Africa accounted for only
10 percent of the world's population, it was harboring 46 percent of the world's refugees
and persons internally displaced by war (Haughton 1997). These urgent humanitarian
needs suck resources away from productive investments in public goods.