The Second Generation Problems

Abstract

The previous chapter examined the first-generation effects of statism: state direction of economic activity and planning with a plethora of state controls (price controls) and establishment of state enterprises to forge Africa’s industrialization drive. To recap, state controls created commodity shortages while inefficient and unprofitable state enterprises—established with foreign loans—failed to deliver the goods. These initial problems may be considered “innocent,” but they fed on each other, creating additional problems or secondary unintended consequences. In this chapter, we examine these second generation problems. For example, a food or agricultural crisis was produced when African agriculture—the livelihood of the majority of Africans—started its decline. The decline was not the result of a deliberate and malicious government policy to destroy agriculture. In fact, most African governments acknowledged the importance of agriculture. Rather, agriculture atrophied in many African countries because of the neglect occasioned by government obsession with industrialization, the imposition of price controls, civil war, and crumbling infrastructure.

Africa can feed herself. Even without using any modern farming techniques such as pesticides and with only the most casual approach to maintaining the soil, the 51 countries of Africa presently have the potential to feed a population three times as large as that now living in the continent, even allowing for the fact that 47 percent of the land surface is useless for crops.

—A Food and Agricultural Organization study cited in a West Africa editorial Dec 14, 1981; p.2959.

Africa today suffers from a “deadly triad” of interrelated burdensfood insecurity, HNIAlDS and a reduced capacity to govern and provide basic services.

—UN Secretaty-General Kofi Annan Africa Recovery 17:1 (May 2003); p.37.

One of the remarkable facts in the terrible history of famine is that no substantial famine has ever occurred in a country with a democratic form of government and relatively free press. They have occurred in ancient kingdoms and in contemporary authoritarian societies and in modern technocratic dictatorships, in colonial economies governed by imperialists from the north and in newly independent countries of the south run by despotic national leaders or by intolerant single parties. But famines never afflicted any country that is independent, that goes to elections regularly, that has opposition parties to voice criticisms, that permits newspapers to report freely and to question the wisdom of government policies without extensive censorship.

—Amarrya Sen, recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics (1998) in the Washington Times, Oct 20, 1998; p.A12.