Agricultural Maladjustment in Africa

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Agricultural Maladjustment in Africa: What Have We Learned after Two Decades of Liberalisation? Carlos Oya Online Publication Date: 01 May 2007 To cite this Article: Oya, Carlos (2007) 'Agricultural Maladjustment in Africa: What Have We Learned after Two Decades of Liberalisation?', Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 25:2, 275 - 297 To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/02589000701396355 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02589000701396355

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Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 25, 2, May 2007

Agricultural Maladjustment in Africa: What Have We Learned after Two Decades of Liberalisation? Carlos Oya Given the extent and significance of rural poverty in sub-Saharan Africa (henceforth ‘Africa’ or ‘SSA’) much of the literature on poverty reduction continues to focus on agriculture and rural development. Agriculture still plays a major role in African economies: it typically contributes 40 per cent of exports, 30 per cent of foreign exchange earnings, 25 to 30 per cent of GDP, and about 70 per cent of employment in the region as a whole (World Bank 2005). Moreover, as the picture appears rather bleak in terms of trends,1 the debate on agricultural policies, adjustment and reforms continues. The 1980s and 1990s were characterised by the dominance of agrarian neoliberalism and the concomitant agricultural adjustment reforms promoted by donor agencies and international lending institutions in most of Africa (Oya 2005). Despite this apparent hegemony of one-size-fits-all policy packages, the timing, content and speed of neoliberal reforms has varied across countries and time over the last 25 years, thus making sweeping generalisations inappropriate.2 This paper revisits important aspects of the debate on agricultural ‘adjustment’ in Africa. First, it looks into the rationale for, and the promises and implementation of, agrarian neoliberalism in Africa, and selectively reviews theory and evidence against the historical and theoretical rationale established in the early 1980s. Second, the paper addresses significant gaps in the most influential literature on the subject: (a) the distributional consequences of agricultural reforms, with their differential impact on various rural classes; (b) the suitability of neoliberal agricultural adjustment in contexts of other pervasive macroeconomic reforms; and (c) the need to re-assess pre-liberalisation policies and state intervention in agriculture in a less dogmatic fashion. It is argued that, given the waning of studies of agrarian differentiation in the 1980s and 1990s, there is only patchy micro-level evidence on the uneven and unintended consequences of agricultural liberalisation. Third, it will be argued that the failure called agricultural ‘maladjustment’ has led to a void in current agricultural policy-making which seems to reinforce the low morale among African bureaucrats already affected by years of reform-led ISSN 0258-9001 print / ISSN 1469-9397 online/07/020275-24 DOI: 10.1080/02589000701396355

© 2007 Journal of Contemporary African Studies

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public sector squeeze. Thus the current pervasiveness of the Post-Washington Consensus (PWC) in policy documents and mainstream literature has led to a predominance of amorphous terms with little content, and policies that seem impossible to monitor, such as ‘empowerment of the poor’, ‘enabling markets’, ‘investment climate’, ‘participatory community development’, ‘mainstreaming X, Y or Z’, and so on (Easterly 2004). The paper is organised as follows. Section 2 addresses the rationale underpinning agricultural adjustment. Section 3 summarises the results of the most comprehensive reviews of the impact of agricultural liberalisation and macroeconomic stabilisation on African agriculture, as well as examining selected case studies that depart from the mainstream. Finally, sections 4 and 5 focus on two important issues: the significance of the distributional consequences of agricultural adjustment and orthodox macroeconomic stabilisation for the livelihoods of different classes of rural people; and the problems caused by incoherent sequencing between macro and structural reforms and by the political economic ‘drivers of incoherence’ in Africa during the 1980s and 1990s.3

The Theoretical and Historical Basis of Agrarian Neoliberalism The dominance of neoliberal ideas applied to agricultural development – in the academic world and in development policy debates of bodies such as the World Bank (WB), the IMF, the regional development banks and, more subtly, some UN institutions (FAO, IFAD) – was based on a number of standard premises (Oya 2005): first, the dichotomy whereby the state and the market are regarded as ‘distinct and mutually exclusive institutions’; second, the efficiency of the market mechanism as opposed to the inherent inefficiency of state institutions in resource allocation and service delivery; third, the distorting effects of state intervention in terms of rent-seeking, technological backwardness, and resource misallocation. The reliance of the neoliberal policy stance in agriculture on mainstream neo-classical work, based on idealised agricultural household models, implies many problematic assumptions.4 One problem of this theoretical preference is the misleading concept of the ‘average representative farmer’, which ignores important historical differences in agrarian structures,5 production dynamics, coexistence of different ‘production functions’, and significant degrees of inequality and stratification in rural areas of poor and middle-income countries, a point to which we will return.6 The theoretical basis of agricultural adjustment strongly hinges on the notion of an ‘idealised’ homogeneous mass of atomised and rational peasant farmers who can be analysed as profit-maximising ‘firms’ with an additional household consumption dimension. In addition, a caricature of the past (the pre-adjustment postcolonial era) is offered, where markets allegedly were suppressed or substantially ‘distorted’. This simplistic analytical framework established the basis for a policy focus on ‘getting prices right’, which became the cornerstone of neoliberal agendas for agriculture in developing countries (Sender

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and Smith 1984).7 This principle was intimately related to the ‘urban bias’ thesis, or the excessive ‘taxation’ of African peasants, which was an article of faith of both neoliberal advocates and neopopulist critics of state intervention in Africa.8 This thesis has been convincingly questioned on various grounds. First, on the methodological flaws surrounding the calculations of price distortions from dubious ‘border prices’.9 Second, on the substantial evidence of numerous exceptions to the ‘urban bias’ thesis and the tendency of the WB and others to either ignore or misrepresent countries where there was an effective ‘rural bias’ for a good part of the pre-reform era (Byres 1979; Widner 1993; Mosley 2002:178).10 Third, on the obsession with ‘allocative efficiency’ and one-off gains at the expense of dynamic productive efficiency and long-term growth (Karshenas 1996). Finally, on the static and deterministic nature of rent-seeking hypotheses about state intervention and the neglect of the diversity of political institutions and histories (Berry 1993; Varshney 1993). However, the specific historical rationale underpinning pressures from Bretton Woods Institutions (BWI) was more determinant for the agricultural neoliberal experiments in Africa than their theoretical background. First, several African countries were severely hit by the international crisis of the late 1970s and two recurrent droughts in the same decade, which resulted in a temporary agricultural failure. This was compounded by growing fiscal and balance of payments problems, as well as by the growing inefficiency and mismanagement of some parastatal input distribution and marketing agencies (for example, Senegal and Tanzania). This temporary ‘crisis’ immediately became the ‘evidence’ of failure of state interventionism in the eyes of BWI and neoliberal advocates. Second, the alleged ‘over-taxation’ of farmers in the 1970s may be exaggerated or even misleading. If we take internal transport and marketing costs into account, in fact most African agricultural support systems effectively subsidised some (often large proportions of) farmers, crops and sectors (depending on the country), because of pan-seasonal and pan-territorial pricing systems, input subsidies and cheap seasonal credit. Moreover, the price subsidy was generalised in some periods of time (when international prices slumped) in countries where stabilisation funds were in place to guarantee producer price stability (for example, in West African Francophone countries). This was compounded by the inability (sometimes for political reasons) of governments to recover farmers’ input-related debts, which eventually resulted in unsustainable fiscal deficits in the short term and a compulsion to accept new donor conditions. There are precedents of similar crises in history which were clearly ignored, such as those that affected countries following ‘Ricardian’ development strategies (Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Canada, South Africa, Sweden and others) towards the end of the nineteenth century, which effectively managed to adjust their economies with even stronger state interventions to foster commodity diversification or industrialisation with the additional help of significant debt defaults.11 In the context of SSA in the late 1970s and early 1980s, neither time nor support for unorthodox strategic adjustment nor debt default was an option.

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The IMF and the WB were mainly concerned with macroeconomic stability and fiscal deficits (which were often wrongly assumed to be the prime cause of instability), and not so much with the structural constraints in African agriculture and its significant vulnerability to external shocks. Unsurprisingly, public expenditure in agriculture was a major victim of orthodox fiscal adjustment in the 1980s. Despite pressures towards reducing the wage bill, initial expenditure cuts generally affected items such as subsidies, income transfers and public investment, that is, development outlays, particularly in infrastructure and productive projects (Gibbon et al 1993:18).12 The squeeze on government credit to farmers was also designed to curb government borrowing (or even printing of money) for the sake of macroeconomic stabilisation. What emerges from this overview is that the first impulse towards agricultural adjustment really came from the imperatives of macroeconomic reforms and the concomitant fiscal and financial squeeze of deflationary policies in the 1980s. The structural reforms in agriculture further reflected the anti-state rhetoric of neoliberal assessments of the situation in reforming countries. Thereafter, ‘short-termism’ in policy-making became a common feature in most adjusting countries, as a result of the tension between internal resistance to reforms (from both elites and masses, depending on the policy measure) and pressures from creditors and donors (Harrigan 2003; Mkandawire 2005). In the creation of a Washington ‘consensus’ (WC) on agriculture, the influence of the WB and the IMF, especially on poorer African countries, has transformed policy debates and established the development agenda to which most governments and researchers have also committed themselves (Sender 2002). Indeed, since the mid-1980s there was a donor front, including the Scandinavians, which echoed the policy recommendations coming from Washington (Gibbon et al 1993). As argued above, the starting point for the assessment of policies prior to neoliberal reforms included two basic elements (Sender and Smith 1984): the assumption that pre-reform policies were caused by ‘mistakes’ – associated with ignorance, poor state capacity or rent-seeking – that could be corrected by a better-informed technocratic class supported by multilateral institutions; and an exaggerated pessimism in the assessment of the agricultural performance in the 1960s and 1970s, to show that ‘wrong’ policies led to agricultural stagnation.

From Washington to Post-Washington Consensus on Agriculture in Africa: Reforms, Biases and Their Outcomes In broad terms, “the Agricultural Adjustment Program was formulated to complement the macroeconomic adjustment process and generate a sufficient supply response” (Cleaver and Donovan 1995:8). In practice, a neoliberal agricultural programme comprised a double package of measures: one towards liberalisation and deregulation of markets, and the other towards the withdrawal of the state from direct support to farmers. Thus the WC on agriculture contained several

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policy targets. First, the removal of subsidies on agricultural inputs and consumer food prices, that is, the demise of ‘cheap’ food policies allegedly favouring a privileged class of urban consumers. Second, the elimination of currency overvaluation, through mega-devaluations, in order to provide incentives to peasant export agriculture.13 Third, the elimination or drastic reform of parastatal marketing and processing agencies, to enable competitive markets and encourage private traders and peasant farmers, and reduce fiscal deficits associated with parastatal agencies. Fourth, the deregulation and liberalisation of agricultural prices, which would potentially increase producer prices and encourage a positive supply response. Finally, the replacement of subsidised agricultural credit with ‘alternative’ measures to establish ‘sustainable’ financial institutions, stabilise financial markets, and reduce bad debts and fiscal deficits. This ‘package’ ignored the diversity of situations and the different ways in which state intervention took place in SSA. Compare, for example, Malawi with Mozambique, or Zambia with Kenya and Zimbabwe, or Ghana with Côte d’Ivoire. In these countries, which shared history and crops to an extent, the specific forms and histories of state intervention were different and responded to different needs and political-economic pressures (Lele and Christiansen 1989). The external conditions were also different in terms of world market price trends and market shares, with certain countries dominating some agricultural markets (Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana in cocoa) and others being absolute price-takers. Despite these specificities, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ adjustment approach has prevailed until recently,14 and governments have been blamed for lack of commitment. Consequently, the poor results of adjustment are allegedly attributed to partial implementation rather than to the nature of the reform package or the contradictions between macro and sector-level reforms (Kherallah et al 2002; Townsend 1999; World Bank 1994).

Methodological Issues for Assessing Implementation and Outcomes of Reforms Before commenting on the outcomes of reforms it is worth recalling important methodological issues, since a vast literature has been devoted to the assessment of the impact of agricultural adjustment in developing countries. The methodological limits of these exercises are well documented. Apart from the usual problems associated with the use of counterfactuals, cross-country datasets not accounting for country specificities, and dubious policy scores, one fundamental weakness is the reliance on extremely restrictive assumptions on the basis of all things being equal (McGillivray 1999:28).15 Mounting technical problems in econometric work based on poor data encompass model mis-specification and (often) unaccounted reverse causality, with a risk of spurious statistical results or biased or misleading coefficients.16 Empirical analyses focused on producer prices as a proportion of ‘world’ prices are also made unreliable by the inadequate consideration of marketing, transport and processing and packaging costs,

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and the variety of marketing margins for different crops (Oya 2002). Moreover, these analyses often use average annual prices (usually published by governments), which may not be useful in contexts of seasonal variations and could obscure a wide range of prices received by different types of farmers in a liberalised environment, depending on the trader, the time of the sale, the scale of the sale, and distance from main consuming centres or export agencies. Furthermore, an important lesson drawn from extensive reviews of the reform experience is that it is difficult to evaluate the impact overall because the experience varies across SSA countries in terms of implementation, sequencing and mediating factors. There are various degrees of implementation, including partial implementation and policy reversals, mostly dependent on political processes and political transition costs, which are often not fully understood by conventional analyses (Kherallah et al 2002; Gibbon et al 1993:105–16). In fact, there does not seem to be consensus on the appropriate timing and sequencing of reforms, a point which will be discussed below (Dorward et al 2004). Finally, another important caveat in any analysis of effects of policy reforms on SSA agriculture relates to the varying interpretations of the data available and the dubious quality of the latter. There are powerful reasons to suspect that the quality of agricultural data for the 1980s and 1990s declined. First, the elimination of parastatal marketing boards and other rural development agencies that had a clear mandate and interest in collecting detailed statistics on cultivated land, production, and especially marketed output, meant that good sources of statistical information were lost and not properly replaced by poorly endowed national statistics offices. Second, there are indications that ‘data politics’ has probably led to overestimations of cash-crop production in order to qualify for more loans, particularly in the initial reform period. Some cases are particularly illustrative in this respect: in Senegal there was a systematic overestimation of groundnut production figures in the 1980s and 1990s, precisely during the reform period and when there were other evident signs of crisis (Oya 2002). In Tanzania the interpretation of trends followed a ‘trade in images’ reflecting the ideological conversion of the Tanzanian government to the neoliberal jargon (evident in the policy documents), while a close inspection of crop performance shows no difference between the ‘crisis’ and the ‘adjustment’ period (Ponte 2002:72). In Ghana, one of the most important showcases of the WC in SSA, cocoa performance appeared to improve in the five years after the first drastic reforms, but there is also evidence that part of the increase in production figures was due to smuggling coming to the surface and to re-exports of production from neighbouring countries (Gibbon et al 1993:118). This is also the case in Ethiopia, with the difference that Ethiopian authorities did expect a reorientation of smuggled exports to official channels after currency devaluation, but export supply response fell well short of expectations (Dercon and Ayalew 1995).

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What Happened to the Expected Outcome of Adjustment? One of the key targets of orthodox adjustment and liberalisation was farmgate prices. The important assumption that farm prices do matter for SSA producers needs to be tested for a range of commodities, countries and regions. In fact, in many areas food crops are effectively non-tradeables, due to the incidence of own-consumption, high transport costs and perishability (World Bank 2005:6).17 In these contexts market price incentives may well be irrelevant. For producers concerned with market prices, Kherallah et al (2002) show that output prices increased in some cases (notably for some export crops) but not consistently over time, since increases were often only temporary (Ponte 2002). Moreover, the increase is often shown in terms of percentage of (border) export prices but not in real (local currency) terms, and this mostly reflects the steeply falling world prices for many commodities (notably coffee, tea, groundnuts, and cocoa) in the 1980s and late 1990s, especially for ‘peasant export economies’ (Mosley 2002:188). Furthermore, the trends in real food crop prices were ambiguous even for the most consistent reformers (UNCTAD 1998). In countries such as Kenya, real producer prices of export and food crops actually declined significantly during the reform period (Karanja et al 2003). Various studies show that competition in marketing networks has increased, that is, there are more private intermediaries involved in agricultural trade (Kherallah et al 2002; Barrett 1997; Peters 2006). This is fairly obvious if we bear in mind that most marketing systems were monopolised by marketing boards and that private trading, even if it happened, was illegal and hence statistically invisible. Therefore, apparent increasing competition, or simply the recorded entry of new private operators in the 1980s and 1990s, would obscure the fact that, during the interventionist phases, information on private traders was inadequate or not reported. However, micro-level analyses consistently show that private markets for food staples have traditionally been much more dynamic than generally assumed, meaning that market controls, particularly in food crops, were often ineffective (Guyer 1987; Berry 1993; Wiggins 2000). What emerges from more recently collected data is that new entry of private traders in agricultural marketing has been overwhelmingly concentrated on retail trade for food and cash crop output, still a much localised activity (Dorward et al 2004; Kherallah et al 2002). Moreover, the relative efficiency of private traders with respect to previous state agencies is questionable. Marketing costs are still too high, due to high transport costs and lack of storage facilities, so the prices offered are still very low (Kherallah et al 2002; Gibbon et al 1993; Oya 2001). The patchy evidence of declining marketing margins and better marketing integration (good for consumers and agricultural producers) mainly comes from Kenya, Ghana, Mali and Zimbabwe. At least two of these countries cannot be considered ‘strong’ or ‘orthodox’ adjusters in agriculture (Kenya and Zimbabwe), and Mali is known as a successful case of vertical state-led cash crop marketing integration in the case of cotton (where the procurement board has not yet been privatised).

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It is possible to outline three forms of transition into new market structures as a result of reforms. First, particularly for food crops, the entry of new private traders is well documented although the reforms merely made many of these already existing traders more ‘visible’. However, most micro-level evidence suggests that, at the village level, few traders have enjoyed oligopsonistic power, which partly underlies the fact that prices did not increase as expected in most reforming countries.18 For example, reforms in Senegal brought social and power relations that prevailed during the colonial and early postcolonial periods back into the ‘new’ markets, thereby enhancing the power of local (richer) traders and not that of small-scale producers (Oya 2001). Overall, therefore, competition has not been as strong as expected and barriers to entry, even in output markets, have been significant (Barrett 1997). Second, for some export crops (tobacco, coffee, fresh vegetables), global business capital, in the form of vertically integrated agribusiness global commodity chains (GCC) with contract-farming upstream, has taken over and, to a large extent, replicated the uncompetitive behaviour that parastatal marketing boards were accused of. This is particularly the case in tobacco agribusiness in countries such as Malawi and Mozambique, where companies (for example, DIMON-Stancom, later merged into Alliance One, and Mozambique Leaf Tobacco – a subsidiary of US Universal Leaf Africa) expect from state authorities a monopsony power over agreed concessions (districts, provinces) to make sure that moral hazard on the part of outgrowers (that is, selling to the competitor and not paying debt back to the initial contractor) did not occur.19 In these mostly buyer-driven chains, powerful international traders and leading retail firms have now to negotiate with a multitude of small-scale outgrowers and large-scale producers as a result of the elimination of export-marketing state monopolies, and in many cases get directly involved in more upstream stages of the chain (Gibbon and Ponte 2005:97). De facto, these new forms of production are based on contract concessions that re-evoke the colonial period and grant significant power to transnational contractors. Thus many critics have regarded contract farming in Africa as a mechanism through which transnational commodity chains exploit unequal power relations with small-scale farmers or even use small-scale farmers as labour intermediaries in one way of resolving the labour problem in plantation agriculture (Watts 1990; Warning and Soo Hoo 2000).20 Third, in some cases parastatal marketing boards prevailed, whether by law or just in effect, simply because private investors were not sufficiently interested in taking over (apart from asset-stripping), as in Senegal for the large groundnut export board (SONACOS),21 or as in Ghana because most farmers preferred the former state-owned company (PBC) for accountability, trust and prompt payments.22 In these cases, a potential source of fiscal revenue and not of losses was eventually stripped from the state after the privatisation of these companies. One of the most significant and widely established effects of fast-track liberalisation and removal or reform of parastatal marketing agencies (especially

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price stabilisation agencies) has been the increase in price volatility, seasonally and spatially, which has resulted in higher degrees of vulnerability for farmers, particularly net food-buyers and ‘distress’ sellers, who cannot choose the time of their transactions (Peters 2006; Gibbon et al 1993).23 However, what has affected most farmers is the negative impact of reforms on input distribution and availability of seasonal finance. Input prices generally increased, especially for (often imported) fertilisers and improved seed, while entry of private traders into input markets remained insignificant and, when it occurred, prices were too high and credit was rarely offered, leading to market segmentation and to demand concentrated on better-off farmers. Private agents have usually restricted themselves to some profitable niches of output and seed markets, leaving other input markets and credit services almost untouched because of low profitability, high marketing costs, scarce working capital, and high risk, all realities often ignored by neoliberal analyses (Kherallah et al 2002; Bryceson 1999; Barrett 1997; Dorward et al 2004). Thus evidence in most countries shows that availability of inputs worsened and demand dropped due to reduction in real incomes, lack of distribution networks and, more importantly, agricultural credit squeeze (Kherallah et al 2002; Dorward et al 2004; Oya 2001; Kelly et al 1998). One alarming byproduct of reduction in input use and the growing obsolescence of farm equipment in many reforming countries is the fall or stagnation of land and labour productivity for both food and cash crops, which partly explains the patchy and very weak supply response observed throughout the continent (Gibbon et al 1993, Kherallah et al 2002; Oya 2001; Mosley 2002). These developments, coupled with generally falling levels of public investment in agriculture, have also usually resulted in growing undercapitalisation of farmers, and greater indebtedness, forcing ‘failed’ farmers to look for alternative non-farm income sources (Ponte 2002; Bryceson 1999; Dikjstra and Van Donge 2001; Peters 2006).24 Furthermore, the disappearance of parastatal marketing boards often came with the removal of physical and human infrastructures (storage facilities, scales, extension agents, marketing agents, enumerators), which directly or indirectly were supportive of marketed production by different classes of farmers. One could expect that these assets would be recycled and used by the private sector but there is no evidence in this respect. However, after the dissolution of rural development agencies nothing much is said about the final destination of their human resources and infrastructures. Bryceson (1999:7) notes that generally “SAP [structural adjustment programming] policies largely dismantled African Marketing Boards and parastatals that had serviced peasants’ input requirements, enforced commodity standards, and provided single-channel marketing facilities and controlled prices. The private traders, who replaced them, varied in their performance through time and space, but mounting evidence points to the fact that they have not lived up to the hopes vested in them by IFIs”.

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In sum, the word ‘maladjustment’ summarises the lack of ‘real’ adjustment to the crisis and the persistence and reinforcement of the most binding structural and institutional constraints to successful ‘Ricardian’ (agricultural) development in Africa (Mkandawire 2005). Thus, farming is increasingly undercapitalised; market articulation (encompassed by price volatility) is deficient and discriminatory against poorer farmers and agricultural workers; labour and land productivity remain low and often keep falling; risk is higher and there are fewer institutional arrangements to cope with farm risk (both environmental – weather shocks – and market risk – price volatility); for some export crops output quantity may have increased (in some countries) but generally quality has decreased, which stifles efforts to penetrate demanding international markets (and non-tariff barriers) and reduces the remuneration per unit of output and returns to labour; and domestic demand constraints have been exacerbated via deflationary policies, thereby increasing the dependence on volatile external markets.

Reassessing State Intervention During State-Led Development One of the implications of the mixed record of agricultural adjustment in some countries (Uganda, Ghana, Mali, Mozambique) and failure in many other cases (Zambia, Senegal, Kenya, Tanzania) should be the need for a reassessment of policies in the pre-reform era and an understanding of the political economy of policy changes. One possibility is that pre-reform policies were not necessarily ‘wrong’ for dynamic efficiency, or that, at least, less drastic reforms could have solved some of the most typical failures of state-sponsored marketing and farm support-systems. However, it is necessary to understand the politics of state intervention in the 1960s and 1970s beyond Bates’s theses. In fact, agricultural policies were often designed and implemented by regimes that sought simultaneously to attenuate potential contestation in urban areas and strengthen the rural basis for their legitimacy (Varshney 1993). Indeed, rural development policies in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire and Tanzania, for example, aimed to offer different forms of support and protection to a vast mass of peasant farmers and (sometimes) indigenous rural capitalists, with the aim of pleasing many constituencies at the same time (Oya 2002; Sender and Smith 1990; Berry 1993; Widner 1993). Scarce resources constrained the manageability and sustainability of these postcolonial projects, while the frequent farmers’ debt ‘amnesties’ were precisely due to the political laxity of the government towards agricultural producers benefiting from credit and inputs from the marketing boards (Oya 2002; Kherallah et al 2002). In Tanzania, scarce human resources and infrastructure severely affected the efficiency of parastatal agencies, which mainly penalised the most dynamic farmers while providing a lifeline for the temporary survival of less viable smallholders (Sender and Smith 1990). At the same time as pan-territorial and pan-seasonal pricing systems implied relatively strong support to more vulnerable and less viable smallholders (Kherallah et al 2002), the intertwining between an incipient state bourgeoisie, with great influence over the management of marketing boards and development agencies, and rural elites, in the form of dynamic large and medium

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scale capitalist farmers but also less dynamic traditional large-scale farmers, was very significant. However, only in a few cases was there evidence of agricultural policies labelled as ‘wager on the strong’ (Malawi, and to an extent Zimbabwe, Zambia, Côte d’Ivoire and Kenya). Frequently, governments following different forms of socialist rhetoric reinforced existing obstacles to the development of capitalist farming with populist policies of support to masses of small-scale farmers (Sender and Smith 1990; Pryor 1990). Finally, as argued by Dorward et al (2004:79), state intervention in the pre-reform era and the often half-hearted commitment to liberalisation afterwards, rather than stemming from rent-seeking, political myopia or mistakes (state failure), flowed from the “recognition that pervasive market failures prevent the private sector from delivering the necessary services”. In essence, many of the state rural-development agencies and policies applied in the 1960s and 1970s, apart from inheriting bureaucratic structures of the colonial period, were also thought of as vehicles for building social legitimacy of new states in rural areas for different types of regimes. In a way, some of these institutions and policies and the way they were implemented (through input, credit subsidies and other outlays) represented timid attempts to create an image of a ‘welfare’ state in rural areas. In any case, the variety of national economic and ideological projects and the various objectives of the adoption of agricultural marketing boards “show the degree of detailed analysis that needs to be undertaken on both an issue-by-issue and a country-by-country basis” (Lele and Christiansen 1989:23), which put in question simplistic and apolitical neoliberal analyses of state intervention (Sender and Smith 1984). Therefore, without denying that policy failures were manifest in some cases during the crisis of the late 1970s, it is still necessary to investigate the real causes of the crisis, when they happened, and the different strategic options that could have been followed, in light of historical experience elsewhere. Moreover, one could use the same argument now frequently cited by neoliberal advocates to argue for further reforms: that 20 years of adjustment is not enough time to question the necessity of orthodox packages. In the same vein, in 1980 there was simply not enough evidence to argue that state-led agricultural development had failed in SSA.

Distributional Consequences of Agricultural Liberalisation Since the 1980s the dominant intellectual focus in SSA has been placed on the pros and cons of adjustment and liberalisation and on aggregate supply and input use patterns and trends. Very little has been done on effects on agrarian structures, structural change and farmers’ differentiation. Indeed, few authors have continued the lively debates typical of the 1970s on changing agrarian structures, rural social relations, agrarian transitions, and the role of agriculture in development (Sender and Smith 1990; Gibbon et al 1993; Wiggins 2000; Karshenas 2001). Thus, it is very hard to find good studies and more systematic evidence on the distributional consequences of reforms within rural areas in SSA.

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Recently, a growing literature has emerged on de-agrarianisation (or de-peasantisation) and the increasing importance of the rural non-farm sector, that is, a new form of informalisation extended to rural economies in SSA (Bryceson 1999). However, even within this literature no systematic and detailed evidence is presented on the way different classes of farmers, peasants and rural dwellers in general have been affected by and reacted to various processes of adjustment reforms. Moreover, the trends towards greater reliance on non-farm income sources cannot be unambiguously established, given the scant evidence on income diversification available for the 1960–1980 period. However, more evidence on the heterogeneity of the small-scale farming sector is beginning to emerge from some studies. Jayne et al (2003) confirm how differentiated the small-scale farmers are between and within countries, using nationally representative household surveys in Kenya, Zambia, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Malawi and Rwanda. Gibbon et al (1993:132) also stress that “smallholders are a highly heterogeneous group comprising quite different social classes and ... production forms” despite the deeply flawed assumption of the WC on SSA agriculture that the agricultural sector in a typical SSA economy is constituted by a homogeneous and equally ‘underutilised’ mass. Already in the 1970s and 1980s, the Malawi government differentiated clearly within the smallholder sector and managed to target a group of more dynamic smallholders in their policy of waging the strong (Pryor 1990). There has been some work on the so-called winners and losers during reforms in agriculture, but usually on the basis of rather aggregate categories. Urban–rural consumer comparisons, the dichotomies farmers-traders, small-scale vs large-scale farmers, and most often, cash-crop vs food-crop producers are often used to qualify statements about the effects of agricultural adjustment. Although these categories are important per se, their analysis does not capture the complexity of distributional outcomes of agricultural adjustment and macroeconomic reforms. For example, it can be argued that the impact on prices has been uneven and has affected various classes of farmers differently: input prices invariably went up, leading to a less intensive use of yield-enhancing inputs and Green Revolution packages, especially for ‘resource-poor’ farmers; export prices, increasingly aligned to world prices, followed international market conditions, which worsened in the 1980s and the late 1990s;25 food prices decreased or increased for imported food depending on the net effects of devaluation and removal of import duties and quotas, and increased for local food after removal of subsidies (Kherallah et al 2002); territorial price spreads and seasonal price volatility also generally increased, hitting producers located in remote regions and poorer farmers compelled to sell at (low) harvest prices, in the form of ‘distress sales’. By and large, these various price effects would adversely affect poorer undercapitalised farmers, landless workers, net food buyers in rural areas, and poorer urban consumers (Ponte 2002; Peters 2006; Gibbon et al 1993). In Senegal, resource-poor small-scale farmers were severely hit by the production crisis after market reforms of the food and groundnut sector (mid-1980s onwards), whereas

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the evidence on large- and middle-scale farmers is mixed, as some dynamic capitalist farmers with political connections were the most obvious beneficiaries of the process, due to their means of production and capacity to compete in volatile markets, and their better access to the few privileges still offered by government institutions (Oya 2001).26 In Malawi, in a rare study of poverty dynamics between 1986 and 1997 based on repeated panel surveys, Peters (2006) shows compelling evidence of substantial increasing inequality (the income ratio of top and bottom income quartiles increased from 3 to 11 between 1986 and 1997) and a significant degree of household ‘churning’ between income classes, largely depending on their particular insertion in the tobacco-growing schemes that flourished in the 1990s. Moreover, it has been shown that, where transnational agribusiness have penetrated to replace the state in export marketing and cash-crop promotion, patterns of income stratification have been reinforced since, due to transaction costs, “under most circumstances, agro-industrial firms prefer to contract with larger growers” (Warning and Soo Hoo 2000:21). In Malawi a small group of better-off growers control a major proportion of total out-grower tobacco exports thanks to their superior endowment of land, seed, fertiliser, labour and their capacity to organise burley clubs to access world prices on the auction floors (Peters 2006:339). An important question that requires further investigation is under what circumstances liberalisation or incorporation of global agribusiness chains favours more dynamic farmers or not, and the extent to which the sustainable development of more capitalist forms of production requires more rather than less targeted state support. In sum, the evidence on neoliberal experiments in developing countries, including middle-income countries, suggests that neoliberal policies have at best diverse effects on the rural population, aggregate production, and structure of production, where different groups gain and others lose. A stylised fact is that processes of social differentiation intensify during and after the implementation of neoliberal reforms without ensuring that more viable and competitive forms of production emerge automatically. Generally the usual winners are the few capitalist and richer peasant farmers and traders economically or politically capable of adjusting to new market conditions, that is, economically or politically ‘viable’ farmers, while the usual losers are: poorer peasant farmers, who, with little competitive potential will struggle to subsist; and semi-proletarians and wage workers, whose working conditions become more precarious (Gibbon et al 1993; Bryceson 1999; Ponte 2002; Oya 2001; Peters 2006). As suggested by other ‘institutional’ analysts, differential responses and effects across classes of farmers and rural people would call for a more disaggregated approach to agricultural policy-making and more caution about the application of reforms across the board (Dorward et al 2004; Jayne et al 2003). Thus targeted interventions and the collection and use of statistical information on agrarian structures and their dynamics to inform policy-making seem an essential component of less biased and misleading, as well as more coherent and effective agricultural policies.

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Macroeconomic Stabilisation, Agricultural Adjustment and Policy Sequencing The relationship between macroeconomic stabilisation and agricultural liberalisation is a complex one. Shiff and Valdés (1998) have argued for a long time that we should take economy-wide policies into account in order to examine the creation or destruction of economic incentives in agriculture. Emphasis on the role of macroeconomic policies on agricultural performance is not misplaced, especially when considering the pernicious effects of excessive overvaluation of the currency on the prospects of export agricultural development (Schiff and Valdés 1992; Sender and Smith 1984). The problem is that orthodox macroeconomic packages, of the kind implemented in Africa, can have the same negative effects if implemented in the wrong context or with wrong sequencing with respect to other sector-specific measures (Mkandawire 2005; Rodrik 1996). More importantly, there is no one single mechanism to achieve macroeconomic stability and competitive exchange rates, as has been consistently shown by historical experience (Chang and Gabrel 2004). Zambia provides an example of how a bad interaction between orthodox macroeconomic stabilisation and agricultural sector adjustment can result in the stagnation and depression of an agricultural sector with otherwise potentially strong competitiveness. The pattern of growth of Zambia is associated with three different policy regimes from the mixed state capitalism in the early part of Kaunda era, to the stop-go adjustment of the 1980s, to full-scale liberalisation and orthodox adjustment from 1991 onwards. In the 1980s several attempts to implement full adjustment programmes during Kaunda’s regime failed because sociopolitical conditions favoured popular unrest, which led to policy reversals and home-grown adjustment without external assistance (Bigsten and Kayizzi-Mugerwa 2000). When the government was forced to get back to the negotiation table with the BWI, more popular unrest led to multiparty elections that ended Kaunda’s regime. The new government inherited an economy that had not changed structurally during the 1980s apart from the reduction in investment rates associated with severe cuts in public investment (Gibbon et al 1993:100). The newly elected government rushed to take the reform commitment to the extreme without extracting any lesson from the past attempts of adjustment. They followed a fast-track reform package that included drastic reforms in the agricultural sector and privatisations. Notably, input and credit subsidies were curtailed or eliminated, and the domestic currency suffered from dramatic depreciations. In the context of import compression, currency mega-devaluations and floating regimes brought inflationary pressures and rapidly eroded rural incomes through the effects on production costs for a majority of farmers, including large-scale commercial growers. It is now clear that the agricultural sector was not ready for such fast-track liberalisation and privatisation process. Agricultural competitiveness was negatively affected by the lack of inputs and seasonal finance and the rise of interest rates as a result of sweeping financial liberalisation (ibid

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2006:67–9). Alternative forms of finance for agricultural producers did not appear. The uneven structure of the agricultural sector and the wide differences between dynamic and non-dynamic farmers led to the increasing isolation of masses of smallholders far from market outlets, from the infrastructural networks, urban centres and areas of economic dynamism. The poverty increase in urban areas as a result of deflationary policies and rising formal sector unemployment affected demand for food and other agricultural produce. Consequently the expected benefits of liberalisation for local maize producers did not materialise from the demand side. Moreover, despite high regional transport costs, trade liberalisation also opened doors to agro-processed goods from more competitive exporters like South Africa, which eventually led Zambian commercial farmers’ unions to voice their concerns (UNDP 2006:70). This was also possible thanks to the open-door policy vis-à-vis large South African retailers (such as Shoprite), which initially favoured the entry of South African products into Zambian urban markets. In other words, this example illustrates how the simultaneous and mis-timed application of trade and financial liberalisation, output and input market deregulation in agriculture, withdrawal of input and credit support to farmers, and mega-devaluations of the currency can have the double effect of impoverishing the urban working and middle class and exposing the structural vulnerabilities of agriculture.27 Much of the conventional literature on agricultural reforms now accepts that even if one supports the implementation of some reforms, in order to adjust to the new global and local contexts, finding the appropriate sequencing and devising country-specific stabilisation packages are keys to success or failure (Dorward et al 2004; Kherallah et al 2002; Ponte 2002).

Post-Washington Consensus and State Capacity ‘Debuilding’ In view of the disappointment regarding WC approaches to agricultural reform, a new PWC is emerging, despite the fact that the WB and other international agencies remain committed to the trinity of stabilisation-liberalisation-privatisation (Mkandawire 2005; Fine et al 2001; Dorward et al 2004). Exponents of this emerging consensus from a new-institutionalist perspective come to the conclusion that agricultural adjustment in SSA was ill-conceived and -designed, precisely because structural factors, historical experience and the role of institutions in agricultural development were missed from the picture. In their view, successful liberalisation could only take place under circumstances that are seldom found in SSA. For them policy phases and sequencing are the key question. They show that historical experiences of agricultural development and successful Green Revolution normally start with ‘establishing the basics’, that is, an adequate system of roads, irrigation, research, extension and (sometimes) land reform, which helps to transform extensive low-productivity agriculture into economically profitable and more intensive agriculture. In a second phase, the state should extensively support farmers through marketing policies such as seasonal finance, input supply systems, creation of reliable local output markets (with buffer stocks, floor prices, other price stabilisation schemes, and so on), in

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order to bring about effective farmer input demand and surplus production (the role played by marketing agencies in the pre-reform era). It is only in the final phase, when Dorward et al (2004) would expect state withdrawal, that the basis for effective private markets is already in place. This is a situation that one would perhaps expect in advanced capitalist countries or New Agricultural Countries (such as Argentina, Chile, New Zealand). The problem is that this appealing stage-schema that ends in a more sustainable ‘free market’ environment with gradual state withdrawal cannot explain the heavy state interventionism in agriculture in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries today, since it focuses on technical and institutional aspects without incorporating the ‘real politics’ of rural sectors and global capitalism which underlie the levels of protection existing in the EU, US and Japan (Berthelot 2001). The emerging PWC on agriculture in developing countries seems to signal a weakening of the neoliberal agenda and a transition from ‘getting prices right’ towards ‘getting institutions right’. In the PWC, a more balanced view of state and markets and their respective roles, the extent of market failures, the addition of more endogenous variables, the notions of ‘state capacity’, the praise for institution building, and governance have added a new flavour to WB thinking on agriculture.28 Recent works in this line show a more balanced view of the nature of the barriers to improving incentives for agricultural production, without an exclusive focus on policy and government failure (Townsend 1999; Meerman 1997). However, the arguments against state intervention in agriculture and the conventional WC solutions encouraging markets are maintained, and only slightly greater emphasis on non-price factors is given without acknowledging the effects of market liberalisation. Indeed, reviews like Townsend’s tend to focus on the role of price incentives, price reforms, devaluation and supply responses to them. They do not capture the essence and implications of these changes in terms of what kind of agrarian capitalism is envisaged in SSA. Although the small-holder farming (or what others would call ‘petty commodity production’) route is implicitly preferred in the PWC, the challenges posed by ever more powerful global capital and the role of GCC cast doubts about the sustainability and competitiveness of this pseudo-capitalist path (Byres 2003; Gibbon and Ponte 2005; Stevens and Kennan 2000). In fact the PWC and, more generally, ‘rural livelihood approaches’ leave the state with a set of vaguely defined core functions along the lines of ‘enabling and promoting the market’ and ‘providing a favourable environment for private investment’. This new ‘eclectic’ agenda is applied to other policies and sectors in a similar fashion and is “more a reflection of confusion and loss of faith than the discovery of a coherent ‘comprehensive policy framework’” (Mkandawire 2005:13). The formulations currently found in agricultural policy documents are remarkably vague and do not clearly indicate how specific interventions would promote new state roles and impact on agricultural performance and long-term development. Indeed, our experience with policy-makers in agricultural sectors in Mozambique, Senegal and Zambia suggests that these ‘new’ roles result in in-

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tellectual confusion and disarray, low morale and a dramatic drop in incentives for very capable strategic planners in African governments. One of our hypotheses for discussion and further research is that the adjustment-related reforms affecting the public sector and particularly state institutions working on rural development, encompassing significant cuts in public (especially capital) expenditure on agriculture, have weakened the capacity of the state to implement old and new policies.29 In a sense, ‘state weakness’ appeared as a self-fulfilling prophecy of the old WC and of those who had the financial resources, thus the power, to establish new policy agendas (Sender 2002). ‘New’ policy recommendations on governance and institutions merely expand the wish list of what governments should do to make sure that market reforms are implemented successfully. By augmenting the list of conditionalities to an impossibly ambitious reform agenda, policy efforts become too dispersed and lose focus, leading to forms of ‘opportunistic strategy’ and ‘do as much as you can, as quickly as you can’ approaches (Rodrik 2004). These approaches leave the most capable civil servants without the intellectual and moral energy to work out a vision or realistic strategies. Indeed, there is no longer a sense of ‘mission’ among qualified bureaucrats. Nor is there strategic vision. As a result, in countries such as Zambia, Senegal, Tanzania, Malawi (Harrigan 2003) and Mozambique, agricultural policies have followed no coherent line and have often (sometimes erratically) responded to the demands from BWI and bilateral donors as they came along.

Concluding Remarks More than 20 years of neoliberal agricultural experiments in SSA have taught us that allowing market forces to work under conditions of high risk and poor and unevenly distributed resources, in an international context of volatile and dumped world prices, can condemn most peasant farmers, landless workers and semi-proletarians (‘footloose’ labour) to a permanent state of vulnerability and uncertainty. This leads many peasant farmers to stop farming altogether, and to the increasing precariousness of working conditions for farm workers, who find it more difficult to secure enough wage labour days to survive. This kind of ‘maladjustment’ to current global economic conditions is not leading to successful agrarian transitions. Historical experiences of success in and outside Africa show that the expansion of agricultural output and competitiveness, investments in technological improvements and adoption of new techniques, without the direct support of the state or other legitimate agency, remain wishful thinking, particularly in a context where the ‘basics’ have not been sufficiently well established. Nor indeed is there any precedent of a smallholder-led liberal path to agricultural development (Byres 2003). So, could neoliberal policies work at all under SSA conditions in the 1980s? The answer is No. The most important weakness of the neoliberal experience in SSA is that agricultural adjustment has brought little as a way of adjustment and structural change, since structural constraints and vulnerabilities have not changed significantly. Thus it is also doubtful that under current conditions in global capital, even after establishing the basics and the necessary

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‘institutional changes’, a free-market path will be economically or politically feasible in Africa. The failure of the neoliberal experiment, current international conditions, and historical experience point to the importance of protection and selective support policies for forms of viable farming that maximise the development potential of countries and that permit a relative stability of earnings and wages for farmers and their workers in developing countries. A re-orientation of policies in this direction and a more realistic set of policy principles would also provide a sense of ‘mission’ and ‘strategic vision’ to the thousands of civil servants who have served under various and incoherent policy regimes to support agricultural development in their countries. Acknowledgements An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference on “The Agrarian Constraint and Poverty Reduction: Macroeconomic Lessons for Africa” organised jointly by the International Development Economics Associates (IDEAs), Ethiopian Economic Association (EEA) and CODESRIA in Addis Ababa, December 17–19, 2004. I would like to thank Francis Wilson and other participants for their useful comments. I also thank Chris Cramer and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on an earlier draft. Notes 1. Most information on poverty trends in SSA suggests that poverty has, on average, slightly increased or stagnated between 1990 and 2001. See http://www.developmentgoals.org/Poverty.htm 2. Many countries started to reform decisively only from 1983 onwards (Ghana, Nigeria, Mali, Malawi, Mozambique, Uganda, Cameroon, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal). Others followed suit only in the 1990s (Zambia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe, for example). By the late 1990s most SSA had implemented at different times and with varying intensity most agricultural reforms towards market liberalisation and state withdrawal from agricultural services, albeit not without sporadic policy reversals, particularly for unpopular measures on fertiliser and food subsidies (Kherallah et al 2002). 3. By ‘drivers of incoherence’ we mean the various political and economic factors that drive different reforms at different times and in different directions in short-term fashion, thereby weakening the capacity of states to design long-term integrated strategies. 4. See Bardhan and Udry (1999), who highlight some of the main differences and evolution within the neoclassical approach to household models. 5. By agrarian structures we refer to established production and property relations, existing forms of production (whether more or less based on hired or family labour), and inequality patterns in scale and distribution of assets (land, technology, capital), all mediated by various institutional arrangements and organisations to access labour, land and other means of production. 6. Consider the differences between the agrarian structures of former settler economies in Africa (Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, Zambia), Sahelian countries (Senegal, Mali, Niger, Chad, Sudan), Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, transition countries in Africa (Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola) and so on. The assumption of a ‘universal peasant farmer’ is simply inconceivable. 7. Shiff and Valdés (1992) and World Bank (1981) show that the emphasis is almost entirely placed on the effects of policies (macroeconomic – exchange-rate overvaluation – and direct interventions) on prices received by farmers. 8. One of these advocates, Bates (1981), interpreted the fact in political terms, as a reflection of the powerlessness of peasants vis-à-vis the state. 9. See Karshenas (1996) for a convincing critique of the empirical and theoretical basis of such studies, exemplified in Schiff and Valdés (1992).

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10. Much of the evidence provided to support the ‘urban bias’ or ‘agricultural plunder’ hypothesis was gathered and analysed by Schiff and Valdés (1992) and only included three SSA countries, namely Côte d’Ivoire, Zambia and Ghana, all very different in terms of the agricultural performance experienced in the pre-reform period. Interestingly, Côte d’Ivoire clearly departed from the typical ‘urban bias’ scenario and was one of the most remarkable examples of state-driven agricultural success in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, partly thanks to the price stabilisation fund (Caistab) and the public investments to promote cocoa commercial plantations and indigenous capitalists (Rapley 1993, Widner 1993; Ponte 2002:22). A similar story can be told about groundnut producer prices, world market-prices and implicit taxation and subsidisation in Senegal (Oya 2002:178). Mosley (2002) shows that in ‘mine or plantation’ economies there was no ‘Bates wedge’ between producer and export prices. 11. For a lucid account of these uneven processes of capitalist development and adjustment to crisis in New Agricultural Countries, as well as definitions of ‘Ricardian’ and ‘Kaldorian’ strategies, see Schwartz (2000:135–44). 12. In Senegal, for example, the reduction in public expenditure for infrastructure and particularly in agricultural support programmes was very marked in the 1980s, when the elimination of the agricultural programme, which had capitalised smallholder farming through subsidised equipment acquisitions to some extent, led to the growing obsolescence and disappearance of farm equipment (Oya 2002:127). 13. Schiff and Valdés (1992 and 1998) have stubbornly emphasised the importance of non sector-specific or economy-wide distortions on agricultural performance, of which the exchange-rate overvaluation is the main culprit. In fairness, some countries such as Ghana and Tanzania in the late 70s and early 80s experienced exaggerated artificial overvaluation of the currency, which did affect some strata of the farming population, particularly farm exporters and large-scale producers, as has also been referred by other non-mainstream researchers (Sender and Smith 1990). However, the variety of situations and the pernicious effects of mega-devaluations were never seriously considered by the WC in Africa. 14. Various World Bank evaluation reports have stressed that there are no blanket solutions and there is need to tailor strategies and recommendations to country specificities (World Bank 2002). However, judging by recent WB practice and some reports (World Bank 2000 and 2005), the insistence on sustaining and completing the usual reform package prevails. 15. Examples of studies with these problems are World Bank (1994), Meerman (1997) and Townsend (1999). 16. To be reliable and relevant, the conventional econometric techniques generally used would require large and reliable data sets that are currently unavailable in most developing countries (Mosley et al 1995; McGillivray 1999; Karshenas 1996). 17. In Tanzania, major food staples are non-tradeables for at least one-quarter of the country (Delgado et al 2005). 18. The fear of village traders’ exploitative practices led many smallholders to be suspicious and generally opposed to liberalisation processes (Mosley 2002:180). 19. Recently the local press reported a threat by Alliance One to pull out their operations from Mozambique because their most productive tobacco concession, in the Tete district of Chifunde, was taken from Dimon in 2005, and given instead to Mozambique Leaf Tobacco. These struggles for concessions have occurred since these companies started operating. See http://allafrica.com/stories/200605190447.html 20. Of course, domestic market liberalisation is only one (and often not so important) of the factors underpinning the emergence of contract farming and global commodity chains. For more details see Gibbon and Ponte (2005) and Watts (1990). 21. SONACOS was finally privatised in 2005, almost under ‘fire-sale’ conditions, as elsewhere in Africa (Mkandawire 2005:6). 22. See Teal and Vigneri (2004). 23. For an econometric study of price volatility increases after reforms see, for example, Karanja et al (2003).

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24. These phenomena are not exclusive to SSA. Patnaik (2003) highlights similar trends in India and the dramatic increase in suicides among farmers and entrepreneurs in the era of neoliberal deflation. 25. These trends have also been noted in the Indian recent experience. See Patnaik 2003. 26. At the same time, many large-scale farmers could not successfully farm after liberalisation and moved into trade and transport instead. 27. Mosley (2002:188) provides another clear example of ‘perverse sequencing’ in Malawi and McMillan et al (2002) illustrate the cashew nut trade liberalisation fiasco in Mozambique. 28. See World Bank (2003) for the recent WB agricultural focus on institutional development and decentralisation. For a critique of these approaches see the collection of essays in Fine et al (2001), Sender (2002) and Rodrik (2004). 29. This is despite currently fashionable donor efforts in ‘institutional development’ and ‘capacity building’, which frequently consist of training by international consultants, postgraduate degrees in American universities, purchase of ministerial vehicles, refurbishment of offices, participation in workshops and so on.

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