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The Food Crisis and the Socialist State in Lusophone Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Rosemary E. Galli
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Extract

To state that government policy has been at the heart of the agrarian crisis in Lusophone Africa is not to deny the importance of drought, the depressed state of international commodity markets, and externally-provoked destabilization in contributing to food shortages and declining volumes of agricultural exports. Rather, this essay argues that commercial, fiscal, and exchange rate policies and the response of the majority of rural producers to them were the most important factors determining the conditions of production and trade during the period 1974-1984.

In her review of the literature on the food crisis in Africa, Sara Berry (1983) singles out the secular struggle over access to resources as motivating African governments in their policy-making. The crisis in Lusophone Africa can be viewed as a struggle between state officials and peasants over the amount and disposition of marketable surpluses. In each of the countries, politicians and bureaucrats sought control over the marketing and pricing of agricultural products and over the importation of basic consumer goods more as a means of securing state revenues and personal gain than as an instrument for promoting rural development Resistance to exploitative policies by food and export crop producers has been the main reason for the agricultural decline until at least 1984. This resistance manifested itself in various ways: diminished production, parallel markets, smuggling, emigration and support for anti-government forces.

Such behavior has been described before, notably by Robert Bates in his work Markets and States in Tropical Africa (1981). Bates examined how the governments of Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, the Sudan and the Ivory Coast squeezed the incomes of small rural cultivators through taxation, overvalued exchange rates, and monosoponistic marketing boards. Bates explained that governments were attempting to extract revenues and export commodities for financing the state apparatus as well as cheap food and raw materials in the interests of urban industrialists and workers.

Type
Articles
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , March 1987 , pp. 19 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1987

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