In the majority of countries sustainable growth of income of the poorest segments of the population depends on agricultural growth. To this end, it seems necessary to improve their access to basic goods such as land and education.
T S Jayne, 2001, MSU Paper No 24)
In the year 2000, in 28 of the 45 African countries on which there is information available, approximately 64 per cent of the people lived on less than US $ 2.00 per day. Among those, about half did not even reach a daily income of US $ 1.00. At least 400 million Africans find themselves in a situation of absolute poverty and around 200 million are considered indigent. In these same countries the percentage of the rural population is 61 per cent. That means that the overwhelming majority of the poor and indigent people are found on the land. They are rural families which survive from the land and from what the land has to offer them1 .
In spite of the US$ 500 billion in investments over the last 40 years, added to another US$ 200 billion contracted in foreign debt, absolute poverty has taken root; in addition the stagnation of technological growth has become part and parcel of the daily lives of hundreds of millions of rural families. The Continent is becoming ever more conscious of this situation and, increasingly, one is faced by a genuine will to go beyond the analytical domain of the problems surrounding poverty, into the normative domain, that is, how to act in order to overcome this situation.
This article joins the efforts of many other Africans, with the understanding that poverty does not refer only to the levels of daily income per person; poverty should also be seen as the lack of power in intra-family relations, as well as between them and the rest of the actors in society and between society in its totality and the natural resources which exist in the African Continent. Moreover, we understand that poverty reduction should not become an objective in itself2 , but should rather be a consequence of the sustainable increase of income and the progressive improvement in the people's living conditions3 , in other words, the production and distribution of wealth.
Today there is consensus that the reduction of poverty or the increase of wealth and its distribution in Africa must necessarily be through the growth of agricultural production; this will necessitate access to the land and to education by the poor4 . Why? For the simple reason that one does not foresee that the structural transformation of the economy and the resulting transformation of the peasant class into workers or artisans in the urban service sectors will happen. At the same time, one also does not foresee that there will be significative investment in large-scale agriculture, which could absorb the hundreds of millions of peasants of the African Continent as rural workers. With the current rate of increase in the population, neither will there be employment for all, nor will there be a tendency for a significant increase in the average salary. Thus, land for all the rural poor becomes an indispensable condition for food security; it is the only valid asset for a sustainable increase in income and for the attainment of the much desired social stability.
But we are not dealing with cold numbers and functional relations alone, when speaking of the land in Africa. For the 400 million African poor, the land is the only certainty of continuity they have at their disposal; it is on the land that they produce the food they eat and the few surpluses or industrial cultures they are able to get, on it they converse with the spirits of their ancestors, on it they find wood and stakes for the construction of their houses, on it they allow the cattle to graze and they look for healing herbs, on it they identify themselves with the origin of life which is carried by the waters of the rivers. The land is the patrimony of the family, the lineage and the community; their ability to resist outside interventions resides in the sustainability the use of the land in the fight against poverty and for the increase of wealth.
In this way, the land has an inseparable relationship to work, human capacity and capital. The empirical evidence showed that among rural families5 the land used for various types of consumption cannot be perfectly replaced by the land geared for the market; in addition, the market does not work exclusively through the convertibility of assets into capital, but also by the convertibility of the latter and the social obligations networks6 . In other words, there are social relationships which go through the land. In this way, the function of distribution on the land is intrinsically connected to the functions of production and consumption, and of these with the rural family. The rural family's function of consumption corresponds to the access to land; the function of production is equivalent to the security of possession; and the distribution function is related to the division of the land in function of the multiplicity of networks which are established by means of blood ties, marriage and inheritance. Thus, for them, above any other interest group, the maintenance of inter-generational returns in the use of resources is of paramount importance, because it is essential for their reproduction.
Footnotes:
- The population of these 28 countries represents 81 per cent of the Continent's total population; it is estimated that the number of those living below the line of absolute poverty surpasses by many tens of thousands the figure of 400 million. These estimates were made on the basis of statistical data published by the UNPD, 2002, Human Development Report, New York: Oxford University Press.
- In this regard see Negrгo, J, 2002. "Para que o PARPA resulte!" Revista Ciкncias Sociais, Vol. No. Universidade de Coimbra.
- Meier, G. 1989. "What do we mean by Economic Development", in Leading Issues in Economic Development, New York: Oxford University Press.
- In this regard see the empirical evidence produced by the University of Massachusetts in Jayne, TS, 2001, MSU Paper No 24.
- By rural family we understand the smallest unit of production, consumption and distribution of the African rural societies.
- Platteau, Jean-Philippe. 2000. "Does Africa Need Land Reform?" in Toulmin, Camilla & Quan, Julian (eds.), Evolving land rights, policy and tenure in Africa, London: DFID.
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