Fundamental source of agricultural transformation is technological change or innovation, which accompanies the introduction of modern agricultural technology and improved cultivation practices in the context of developing countries, such as sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).Markets fail to generate and disseminate modern agricultural technology in a socially optimum manner because technological knowledge is often public goods.Thus, appropriate government intervention is necessary to achieve desirable technological change in agriculture.The critical questions are what kinds of crops are promising in SSA, what kind of agricultural technology is needed, and what kind of government intervention is desired.Based on the literature review and new statistical evidence, this study attempts to identify the promising crops, required technologies to realize major productivity gains, and desirable government policies.In short, the purpose of this study is to design a strategy to transform agriculture in SSA by means of generation and diffusion of modern agricultural technology and management practices for selected key crops.The expectation is that the agricultural revolutions thus initiated in these crops will diffuse to other sub-sectors and ultimately transform the whole of agriculture.1 Otsuka, Liu, and Yamauchi (2016a, 2016b) point out that Asia is likely to lose comparative advantage in agriculture because of the dominance of labor-using small-scale farming in this continent in the face of increasing cost of labor due to rapid growth of nonfarm sectors. 2 Recently, however, the author of this background paper and his colleagues published
Keijiro Otsuka (Sun,) studied this question.