To be fair to George, she does draw attention to the existence of “local elites" in the Third World. Yet all too often with those who subscribe to this neo-colonial model of the world, it is not that such an elite exists that matters but that it should so unashamedly ally itself with its erstwhile colonial masters.
The dominant ideas in society being those that best serve the interests of its ruling class, it is perhaps not surprising that contemporary politics in Africa should be so receptive to Leninist ideology with its statist prescription for the management of an emergent capitalism. On the other hand, as Lanning suggests, in trying to consolidate their economic position Africa's rulers depend heavily on the revenue accruing to their national treasuries from foreign companies operating within their territories. Such a situation demands a degree of pragmatism. For a ruthless pragmatist like President Mobutu of Zaire this has proved most rewarding. With a personal fortune of about £100 million, Mobutu is one of the richest men in the world, while the average wage of a Zairean worker amounts to just over ten dollars a month. Clearly, if Africa’s ruling class chafes against the constraints of “neo-colonialism", it is also very much a beneficiary of it. While it has neither the inclination nor the option to withdraw from the interlocking relationships characteristic of an integrated world economy. Dinham and Hines point out to what extent it has been able to modify these relationships to its own advantage:
More recently, however, the trend has been for these multinational firms to opt out of plantation agriculture in which many of them have their roots and to move towards an arrangement known as “contract farming”. What this means is that local producers are contracted by a firm to produce a certain output which the firm then purchases at a fixed price. This has the advantage for the firm concerned in that it eliminates the risks attached to growing crops.
But while multinational firms invest less in direct landownership than they did in the past, in other respects their dominance has become more entrenched and pervasive. These latter activities include the marketing, processing and transport of agricultural products as well as the provision of agricultural inputs such as fertilisers, machinery and management or technical services. Such "vertical integration" is the hallmark of modern agribusiness corporations. In other words they are able to exercise wide ranging control over the many links that make up the food chain, from the supply of seeds to the packaging of the final product.
For the proponents of economic nationalism, this is a highly regrettable state of affairs. Not only are African countries denied greater "vertical" control over their products but are economically restricted in a “horizontal” sense as well. This is to say their structure of production is relatively undiversified. being closely aligned in most cases to a fairly narrow spectrum of external markets which absorb the bulk of Africa’s trade. According to Dinham and Hines
Twelve countries are dependent on just one main crop for over 70 per cent of their income. and a further eleven countries depend on only two crops for well over half their income. [4]
Such a highly concentrated pattern of production has a number of disadvantages built into it. In the first place, it greatly increases the risk of loss due to environmental factors. It also makes these countries extremely vulnerable to fluctuations in the price of their export crops. Just as a mining community in Britain, for example, could be devastated by the closure of a mine on which it heavily depends, so a drastic fall in the price of a single agricultural product can wreak havoc with whole regions given over to the production of this crop. In Africa’s case, probably the most extreme example of “over-concentration” is that of Gambia, where groundnuts are grown on 73 per cent of the arable land and account for 90 per cent of its export revenue.
The market economy is, of course, an inherently unstable system and within it the price of agricultural products tends to be more volatile than most. It is this very instability which adds yet another dimension to Africa’s plight in that a high proportion of its export crops happen to be slow maturing and so not readily adaptable to the vagaries of the market.
Take, for example, coffee. In at least eight African countries coffee is an important export crop grown largely by smallholders. High current prices will induce farmers to plant or expand their acreage of coffee trees. Once planted they have to wait for roughly five years for the coffee trees to mature but as Moore-Lappe and Collins point out:
By the time your first harvest of such crops is ready you might find the bottom has dropped out of the market. And it probably will have since producers in your country and others will have planted to meet the demand at the same time you did The likely result is overproduction once the new trees begin to bear more than the consumers are willing to buy even with a drop in price. [5]
In the economically advanced areas of world capitalism, governments have usually sought to cushion agriculture from the erratic workings of market forces. But this in turn has created yet another problem: periodic crises of “over-production” and chronic food surpluses. In fact so huge are these surpluses that in America alone it costs £700 million a year just to stockpile them. [6] But such stocks are by no means surplus to human requirements; they are surplus to the capacity of the market system which restricts workers’ consumption to the size of their wallet. Once again, Susan George:
As long as food is regarded as a commodity . . . you will have this scandalous situation of surpluses on the one hand and famine on the other. Because people who can’t pay. who cannot become consumers with a Capital C are not interesting to this world system. [7]
In the Third World, however, there is far less scope for governments to intervene and protect their agricultural sector in the way that the EEC or the American government can. The reason is that the subsidies paid to farmers in the richer countries represent a tax burden on other sectors of industry. But in the developing countries this is hardly a practicable course of action:
Developing countries are so called because their other industries are not developed: generally speaking, agriculture is their one main industry. Agriculture has, in their case, to support the government. Only in developed countries with prosperous industries able to give revenue to the government can the government, in its turn, support agriculture. [8]
In addition to the problems affecting African countries arising from fluctuations in the prices of their agricultural exports, there has been in the post war era a longterm tendency for these prices to drift downwards against those of imported manufactures and oil. For example, "in 1969 a coffee producing country had to sell 66 bags of coffee to buy one 16 tonne truck but by 1979 it had to sell 123 bags of coffee to buy the same truck" [4] Don Casey, in a paper prepared for the UN Development Programme, estimated that the total loss of foreign exchange earnings to Africa due to this relative fall in the price of agricultural exports in the two decades after World War Two, "exceeded all foreign funds invested, loaned or granted during that period". [5]
This "deterioration in the terms of trade" has prompted African and other Third World governments to try to secure commodity agreements through bodies like the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in order to stabilise prices or else to form producer cartels along the lines of OPEC. To date such attempts have been largely unsuccessful. Partly this is because "producer countries" are themselves no more a monolithic bloc than their customers but are deeply divided by competition over markets. When, for example, a conference was held some years ago to try to reach an International Tea Agreement, several African countries objected to the idea of fixing prices or quotas. The reason was that Africa’s share of world output was projected to grow substantially in the near future.
Faced with these increasingly stringent economic pressures, African governments have little choice but to move even further down the road that has led to the predicament in which they find themselves. To boost their revenue they must encourage commercial agriculture. In so doing they have had to turn more and more to multinational agribusiness for the necessary imports and to private banks or aid agencies for loans to finance this expansion. This of course only further reinforces the need to promote commercial agriculture. It is after all mainly from this source (apart from the mining sector in some cases) that governments can hope to raise the necessary amounts of foreign exchange that can go towards repaying the debts incurred.
For peasant farmers throughout Africa such developments translate into a mounting burden of misery. As peasant farmers they are of course mainly “self provisioning" — they produce food primarily for their own consumption — production for the market being a secondary consideration. But today this social arrangement is coming under increasing attack.
After “independence”
The basic difference between Tanzanian rural life now and in the past stems from the widespread introduction of cash crop farming. Over large areas of the country peasants spend at least part of their time — and sometimes the larger part of it — on the cultivation of crops for sale — crops like cotton, coffee, sisal, pyrethum and so on. But in the process the old traditions of living together, working together and sharing the proceeds have often been abandoned.
The Arusha Declaration itself was an attempt to transform peasant agriculture by reducing the influence of market forces. It sought to build a self reliant economy by raising agricultural productivity through the mass mobilisation of peasants within a framework known as the Ujamaa (meaning “familyhood”) programme. Among other things this entailed the enforced resettlement of scattered peasants into some 8000 planned villages, ostensibly to extend essential services to the rural population as a means to greater productivity.
The Ujamaa experiment is interesting because of its ideological commitment to the idea of peasant self-reliance. Its failure to live up to this commitment — for it came increasingly under the control of a burgeoning state bureaucracy — highlights all the more starkly the inherent conflict of interests between African governments generally and the peasant populations in the countries which they govern. The fact of the matter is that these governments need to further extend the influence of market forces, not to reduce it; to transform, as Marx put it. “a society in which one definite mode of production dominates even though not all productive relations have been subordinated to it" into one based more and more on purely capitalistic relations of production. In short, what the Ujamaa programme foundered on was not an ideological betrayal but the economic exigencies of Tanzanian capitalism and its heavy dependence on foreign imports and aid resulting in the need to generate foreign exchange.
How is the capitalist imperative to extract marketable surpluses from cash crop production transmitted to, and impressed on, the African peasant? In colonial times a favoured method to induce peasants to grow cash crops was by levying taxes. This remained the case after political independence. Indeed, in some cases the burden of taxation has substantially risen:
In Mali in 1929 the French levied a tax that required each adult over fifteen to grow between five and ten kilos of cotton to pay for it. By 1960, the last year of French rule, the tax had risen to the equivalent of forty kilos. By 1970. during the drought, the successor government forced each adult peasant to grow at least forty eight kilos of cotton just to pay for taxes. [5]
Generally speaking, crops that peasants produce for export are purchased by marketing boards — usually government-run and almost all monopolies — and then sold to foreign buyers for processing. The price that peasants are paid is often far less than that charged by the marketing board which in turn reflects the state of the world market. It may be deduced that the lot of the peasant might improve with an improvement in the world market. But this is not necessarily so:
A slight increase in income that peasant farmers in underdeveloped countries might acquire from a rising world price for their commodity has to be weighted against the increased threat of displacement by land-grabbing commercial farmers or corporations that see higher prices as new grounds for profit. [5]
In the post war era most countries in Africa experienced a surge in cash crop production though more recently in the 1970s output has tended to level off (partly due to the world recession). Significantly, this growth was achieved primarily not by raising yields but by expanding the area under cash crop production. Inevitably, this was at the expense of subsistence agriculture which was progressively pushed onto less productive marginal land. Since subsistence agriculture is a major local source of food, this development goes a long way towards explaining the steady fall in per capita food production in Africa over the last twenty years or so.
In the past the availability of relatively abundant land, coupled with communal forms of land tenure, tended to cushion subsistence agriculture and ensure a modicum of food security. Indeed, it was this that mainly inhibited the development of a strong indigenous landowning class. But today this picture is rapidly changing as a recent survey from the Cornell University Centre for International Studies suggests:
The study found a trend across Africa towards increasing privatisation of communal lands, growing concentration of landownership and the fragmentation of holdings, all factors further aggravating rural poverty. In some countries lands traditionally available to all tribal members are being appropriated by government officials or foreign firms, usually with the acquiescence of chiefs.[4]
It has been estimated that three quarters of Africa's population now have access to less than 4 per cent of the land [2] while in many parts of Africa “small farmers do not own enough land to occupy themselves for at least 6 months of the year”. [9] And most importantly, with the question of famine in mind, “8-10 per cent of the rural labour force in Africa is now landless and these numbers and proportions are growing rapidly". [4]
The consequences have been catastrophic for millions of peasants caught between the hammer blows of the market economy and the anvil of diminishing returns from subsistence agriculture. And as rural deprivation worsens, so the tide of migration to the cities has gathered pace. Africa may be the least urbanised continent. with less than a quarter of its people living in cities, but its rate of urbanisation is roughly twice that of its population growth. This means on current trends that the population of African cities can be expected to double every 14 years. But how can this growing population be fed when domestic food production mainly in the form of peasant farming is in the throes of decline?
The answer as far as governments are concerned is to import food, particularly cereals, from abroad. This first began on a significant scale in the 1960s when the price of cereals was low as a result of the accumulation of huge surpluses in North America and Europe. But. as Sir Fred Catherwood explained, this was by no means an unmixed blessing:
These surpluses from Europe and from America depress Third World prices; they put Third World farmers out of business, they drive them off the land and into the shanty towns and they reduce rather than increase production in the Third World. [7]
Without doubt. African governments are fully aware of this, but whether they are in a position to do anything about it is quite another matter. They have to take into account for example the likely response of town dwellers to any increase in the price of basic foodstuffs that might benefit local producers. Furthermore, as new tastes become entrenched in the urban areas it is even more difficult to break away from dependence on a particular cereal (like wheat) which for climatic or other reasons cannot be grown in much of Africa. The population of Africa may be mainly rural but political power is overwhelmingly urban-based, with consequences graphically spelt out by Basil Davidson:
So it was increasingly the towns, after independence, that dictated the priorities of economic policy; and the new demands of the towns, pushing aside the needs of the countryside, increasingly called the tune. More and more exports had to go in paying for the imports demanded by the towns . . . the towns and cities, in short, became the tail that wagged the economic dog. and the rural populations, still in most cases the great majority of all the people, had to suffer for it. [10]
When in fact big increases in food prices have been pushed through against the wishes of the urban population, this has in many countries been the prelude to serious riots and, in some cases, a successful coup d'etat. Little wonder, as Rene Dumont put it. "governments fear urban unrest far more than the dispersed and unorganised peasant farmers”. [11] Prompted by this threat—not to mention the military aspirations of rival African states — they have sought to massively arm themselves with the paraphernalia of repression: “At present governments spend an average of between 4 and 7 per cent of their budgets on agriculture — while spending 20 per cent on defence". [12]
More recently in the 1970s the cost of food imports rose substantially. For African countries this was an ominous development. particularly when seen against the background of a relative fall in the value of agriculture exports. Many governments in response to this crisis have initiated large scale (often state run) agricultural schemes in a bid to boost domestic food production by attracting foreign investment and expertise.
At first sight this might seem an unlikely area for foreign firms to invest in, for the reason so candidly explained by the Chairman of General Foods: "It is virtually impossible for a private business establishment to develop, distribute and sell enough of the kinds of food poor people need and still break even, much less look for any profit". But the role of aid has been a crucial factor in enticing agribusiness. Firms find it sufficiently lucrative to participate in large scale agricultural projects as these "attract funding on concessional terms by aid agencies" and with payments effectively guaranteed by the aid agencies concerned this eliminates financial risks to the firms themselves. In short, with the prospect of large scale schemes coming to dominate domestic food production in the 1980s this will "ensure agribusiness an increased role in Africa’s food production, thus complementing its historic control of Africa's cash crop production". [4]
Should this happen it will further erode subsistence farming, displacing peasants or driving them more and more into the market place of hunger where the economic risks are as great as the physical margins of survival are small. For increasing numbers of them throughout Africa a way of life is dying by degrees; slowly strangled, as though by a python whose length spans the circumference of the globe.
Robin Cox
References
(1) African History and Culture, edited by R Olaniyan, 1982
(2) How the Other Half Dies. S.George, 1979
(3) Africa Undermined. G.Fanning with M. Mueller. 1979
(4) Agribusiness in Africa. B.Dinham & C. Mines. 1983
(5) Food First, F.Moore Lappe & J.Collins. 1982
(6) The Observer, 1 April 1984
(7) Utopia Limited, programme notes, 1984
(8) Agriculture The Triumph and the Shame. R Body. 1982
(9) The growth of Hunger. R.Dumont & N Cohen. 1980
(10) The Story of Africa, B.Davidson. 1984
(11) The Guardian. 25 June 1982
(12) Newsweek. 6 August 1984
