Introduction
In the first section of this paper a detailed rural profile of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is derived on the basis of a new and highly disaggregated data set based on a large number of recent country household surveys. The profile that results from the data analysis is quite bleak and reveals the significantly greater poverty, income inequality and agricultural stagnation in SSA as compared with Asia and other parts of the developing world. The discouraging rural socioeconomic profile that is painted in Section 1 raises two fundamental issues: (1) why did the rural sector in SSA evolve so differently than in other regions and particularly Asia; and, (2) what are the main factors that contributed to or caused the particular rural development path followed by SSA in recent times?
Consequently, in Section 2 we explore the major factors that appear to have influenced the African rural sector development path. These factors are grouped together under the heading of physical, technological and legal environment and further subdivided into access to land, quantity and quality of infrastructure, extent of market integration for agricultural products, relative size of the marketable surplus, agro-climatic diversity and technological constraints, and land tenure and titling.
Section 3 is devoted to an analysis of policies, institutions, and cultural and community norms affecting agriculture and the rural sector. Clearly policies at the macroeconomic and sectoral levels have tended to discriminate heavily against agriculture either directly or indirectly. In particular, the very divergent treatment of the agricultural surplus over time in SSA as compared with Asia is brought to the fore. Next, examples of inappropriate institutions within the context of SSA that contributed to agricultural stagnation are given and finally, the contrast between the typical cultural and community norms prevailing in SSA and Asia is drawn.
The final section of the paper deals with some conclusions and policy recommendations.
Footnotes
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The authors are, respectively, Chief, Economic and Social Policy Division, UNECA and the H.E. Babcock, Professor of Economics and Food Economics, Cornell University.
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