Crisis and Change in African Agriculture: A Comparative Study of the Ivory Coast and Nigeria

The notion of a general crisis in African agriculture has entered current African development lexicon with great rapidity. In spite of questionable quality of some of most basic agricultural production statistics (see Berry, 1984), critics of quite different political and theoretical persuasion have promoted view of widespread structural stagnation (World Bank, 1981; Eicher, 1982; Lofchie and Commins, 1982). Sustained by realities of starving peasants in Horn of Africa, of a meteoric growth in food imports during 1970s, and persistence of high fertility regimes across continent, this identification of an agricultural collapse in more than twenty African states raises spectre of a Malthusian crisis of terrifying proportions (Africa News, Feb. 6, 1984).1 The plausibility of a widespread agrarian crisis is lent further credence when it is painted on much larger canvas of national economic performance. The quadrupling of oil prices, stagnant or falling primary commodity prices, high interest rates and debilitating debt repayments, and periodic recession in world economy have all contributed to unfavorable current account balance and economic austerity across continent as a whole. There are two broad theoretical lines of reasoning that have come to predominate in contemporary debates on origins and genesis of African acrisis. The first, which we shall refer to as continuity or primordial argument, posits the dead hand of pre-industrial despotism (Hart, 1982: 166) as defining parameters of current conjuncture. Essentially weak African states, decentralised and uncaptured peasant economies, and preservation of pre-capitalist commodity exchange together produce a fragile and chaotic political economy incapable of mobilizing surpluses for sustained accumulation (Hyden, 1980). The second theoretical corpus is what we call public