© 1989 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank
research-article |
Sources of Growth in East African Agriculture
Uma Lele is a division chief in the Country Economics Department, the World Bank. This article is based on work done for a World Bank research project, Managing Agricultural Development in Africa (MADIA), which was conducted with the participation of the governments of Cameroon, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Nigeria, and Senegal and of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.K. Overseas Development Administration, the Danish International Development Agency, the Swedish International Development Authority, the governments of France and of the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Commission for the European Communities. The author wishes to thank Harris Mule, M. L. Muwila, J. S. Magombo, Stephen O'Brien, Paul Isenman, Gregory Ingram, Andrew Spurling, Michael Westlake, Kevin Cleaver, and James Adams for helpful comments.
A dynamic agricultural sector is critical for alleviating Sub-Saharan Africa's current economic crisis, and for laying the foundations of sustained future growth. In recent years, however, agriculture has performed poorly in many African countries. Efforts to assist its recovery, often through structural adjustment lending, have suffered from inadequate information about country- and region-specific factors, and from an emphasis on macroeconomic policies without complementary interventions at the sector level. The article describes the patterns of agricultural growth in Kenya, Malawi, and Tanzania, and examines price and nonprice aspects of three sets of factors: initial endowments and subsequent exogenous developments, general economic influences, and sectoral issues and policies. It suggests that government action at the sectoral and subsectoral levels in such critical areas as land policy, smallholders' access to inputs, and agricultural research needs to be combined with macroeconomic reforms to achieve sustained and broadbased agricultural growth.