Policy and Capital Market Constraints to the African Green Revolution: A Study of Maize and Sorghum Yields in Kenya, Malawi and Zimbabwe, 1960–91

As is well known, one element in the continuing underdevelopment of sub-Saharan Africa vis à vis other parts of the Third World is the continuing poor performance of the agricultural and, in particular, the food crop sectors. Both in per capita and per acre terms, food crop yields in Africa lag well behind performance elsewhere, and in per capita terms, food production at the beginning of the 1990s is actually lower than it was ten years ago (see Chapter 11). There can be few more urgent development priorities, whether in terms of relieving pressure on the balance of payments, releasing resources from the food-producing to the tradables sector, or promoting equity by raising the incomes of poor rural people, than finding a means of correcting this dismal performance. Most assessments of the possibility of a green revolution in Africa, however, have been profoundly sceptical, usually for some combination of the following reasons: There does not exist a ‘shelf’ of high-yielding varieties of African crops that holds out the hope of increasing yields on anything like the same scale as was achieved in Asia in the 1960s and 1970s through the introduction of modern varieties of wheat and rice (see, for instance, Lipton, 1988). Because population densities are lower in Africa than in Asia, there is less incentive to intensify production methods, except in a few areas of high population concentration (Biswanger and Pingali, 1988). Soil, climate and irrigation potential are all much more hostile to the introduction of modern varieties in Africa than in Asia.