Guinea’s Agricultural Sector in Historical Perspective

Abstract

Throughout this century, the agricultural sector in Guinea has been the subject of numerous development policy experiments. Before the French colonised the area, most agricultural activity was for subsistence or regional and local trade. With the French came the extraction of rural resources, the introduction of cash crops, and attempts to establish rural co-operatives as a means to improve production. But the farmers sought to ‘exit’ from these attempts to extract more out of their production. In independence, experimentation with rural co-operatives continued, though this time under a much more dominant state which also attempted to control all agricultural trade. Again, the farmers sought escape from this control. The involvement of the World Bank in Guinea’s agricultural sector in the 1980s following the change of government brought a new strategy for its development which relied primarily on the free market and which meant to reverse this phenomenon of ‘exit’.