Abstract
The outside world has grown weary of repeated agricultural crises in Africa. Grim prognoses of continued per capita agricultural decline make food security an increasingly elusive goal, and while the need has perhaps never been greater, ‘aid fatigue’ has dampened the willingness of outsiders to finance Africa’s agricultural development. Yet building agriculture remains central to Africa’s development. Few African countries have solved the critical challenge of ensuring food security, and most remain faced with an increasing gap between population growth and food production. Furthermore, few low-income countries whether inside or outside of Africa have found alternatives to the time-tested development strategy of basing their growth on the transfer of surplus resources from agriculture to other sectors of the economy.
The Chinese would view the question, ‘Is your experience transferable?’ as a very odd and imprecise one. They would surely say something like ‘What experience? At what time? In what sequence? Are you talking about ways of growing rice or means of organizing small-scale industry? Or are you talking about overall socio-economic ideology and organization? Are you talking about 1949 or 1956 or 1960, 1974 or 1977? You really must be more precise.’1
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Notes
R. H. Green, ‘Transferability, Exoticism and Other Forms of Dogmatic Revisionism,’ World Development, vol. 6, 1978, p. 709.
Carl Eicher makes the point about research in the colonial period. Carl Eicher, ‘Sustainable Institutions for African Agricultural Development,’ ISNAR Working Paper No. 19, ISNAR (International Service for National Agricultural Research) February 1989, p. 19.
This seems to be true irrespective of the source of aid. See, for example, the World Bank’s 1988 evaluation of its rural development projects in Africa, which found that at least half of their projects had failed. World Bank, Rural Development: World Bank Experience, 1965-1986 (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 1988).
See Carl Eicher, ‘Zimbabwe’s Maize-Based Green Revolution: Preconditions for Replication,’ World Development, vol. 23, no. 5 (May 1995).
See K. Otsuka and C. Delgado, ‘New technologies and the competitiveness of high and low potential rural areas in Asia and Africa,’ invited paper presented at the 22nd International Conference of Agricultural Economists, 22-9 August 1994, Harare, Zimbabwe.
Carl K. Eicher, ‘Africa’s Food Battles,’ in Carl K. Eicher and John M. Staatz (eds), Agricultural Development in the Third World, 2nd edn, 1990, p. 517.
Barbara Stallings, ‘International Influence on Economic Policy: Debt, Stablization, and Structural Reform,’ in Stephan Haggard and Robert R. Kaufman (eds), The Politics of Reform: International Constraints, Distributive Conflicts, and the State, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Constance Anthony, Mechanism and Maize: The Politics of Technology Transfer in East Africa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
See, in particular, Peter Hall, The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism Across Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989)
Kathryn Sikkink, Ideas and Institutions: Developmentalism in Brazil and Argentina (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
George M. Foster, ‘Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good,’ American Anthropologist, vol. 67, no. 2 (April 1965) pp. 293-315.
See the first edition of Everett Rogers’ book Diffusion of Innovations (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1962).
Ester Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change Under Population Pressure (London: Allen & Unwin, 1965).
Theodore W. Schultz, Transforming Traditional Agriculture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964).
See Vernon Ruttan, ‘Cultural Endowments and Economic Development: What Can We Learn From Anthropology?’ Economic Development and Cultural Change, vol. 36 (April 1988) pp. S247-72.
See Mamadou Dia, Africa’s Management in the 1990s and Beyond (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 1995).
Michel Crozier pointed this out in The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964).
C. Peter Timmer, John W. Thomas, T. Louis Wells, and David Morawetz, The Choice of Technology in Developing Countries: Some Cautionary Tales (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975)
Susan Scott-Stevens, Foreign Consultants and Counterparts: Problems in Technology Transfer (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987).
E. F. Schumacher’s 1973 book Small is Beautiful struck a responsive chord in many who were puzzling over the problems experienced in technology transfer to the developing countries. E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful (London: Blond and Briggs, 1973).
Uma Lele, The Design of Rural Development: Lessons From Africa (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press for The World Bank, 1975) p. 180.
John P. McInerney, The Technology of Rural Development (Washington, DC: World Bank Staff Working Paper No. 295, October 1978) p. 44.
Penelope Francks. ‘The Development of New Techniques in Agriculture: The Case of the Mechanization of Irrigation in the Saga Plain Area of Japan,’ World Development, 7 (1979) pp. 531-9.
Ellen P. Brown and Robert Nooter, ‘Successful Small-Scale Irrigation in the Sahel,’ World Bank Technical Paper No. 171, The World Bank, Washington, DC, 1992, pp. 32-5.
On the mechanization of Chinese agriculture, see Cheng Xu, Han Chunru, and D. C. Taylor, ‘Sustainable Agricultural Development in China,’ World Development, vol. 20, no. 8 (August 1992) pp. 1127-43.
See David Zwieg, ‘Strategies of Policy Implementation: Policy “Winds” and Brigade Accounting in Rural China, 1968-1978,’ World Politics, vol. 37 (January 1985) pp. 267-93
Benedict Stavis, The Politics of Agricultural Mechanization in China (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978)
Thomas B. Wiens, ‘The Limits to Agricultural Intensification: The Suzhou Experience, in Randolph Barker and Beth Rose’, Agriculture and Rural Development in China Today, pp. 54–77, Cornell International Agriculture Monograph 102 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University, November 1983).
World Bank, Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action (Washington: The World Bank, 1981), popularly known as the ‘Berg Report’.
Urna Lele, ‘Managing Agricultural Development in Africa,’ in Eicher and Staatz (eds), Agricultural Development (2nd edn) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) p. 538.
Jean Ensminger, Making a Market: The Institutional Transformation of an African Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992) p. 15, fn. 22.
T. W. Schultz, ‘Institutions and the Rising Economic Value of Man,’ American Journal of Agricultural Economics 50 (December 1968) pp. 1117-18.
Anne O. Krueger, Constantine Michalopoulos, and Vernon W. Ruttan, Aid and Development (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989) p. 31.
See Douglass North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990): Robert Bates, Beyond the Miracle of the Market (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Ensminger, Making a Market (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
Yujiro Hayami and Vernon Ruttan, Agricultural Development, 2nd edn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985)
Mustapha Nabli and Jeffrey Nugent (eds), The New Institutional Economics and Development: Theory and Applications to Tunisia (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1989).
David Leonard, Reaching the Peasant Farmer: Organization Theory and Practice in Kenya (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977) pp. 17-18.
Robert Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
Jarice Hanson and Uma Narula, New Communication Technologies in Developing Countries (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1990) p. 149.
‘The Case of India,’ in Derick Brinkerhoff and Art Goldsmith (eds), Institutional Sustainablity in Agriculture and Rural Development: A Global Perspective (New York: Praegar, 1990) p. 172.
Arthur A. Goldsmith, Building Agricultural Institutions: Transferring the Land-Grant Model to India and Nigeria (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990).
Denis Goulet, The Cruel Choice: A New Concept in the Theory of Development (New York: Atheneum, 1971) p. 171.
For the definitive discussion of the ‘typical’ African state, see Robert Jackson and Carl Rosberg, ‘Why Africa’s Weak States Persist: The Empirical and Juridical in Statehood,’ World Politics, 35, 1 (1982) pp. 1-24.
John G. Ruggie, ‘International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order,’ International Organization 36 (Spring 1982) p. 386.
Lucian Pye, Asian Power and Politics: Cultural Dimensions of Authority (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) p. 88. Pye followed this by noting that ‘people who were not capable of responding properly to the influences of their model rulers were seen as being less than human’ (pp. 88-9). Some of the Chinese working with African counterparts clearly had internalized these values, and were quite unselfconsciously racist in their remarks.
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© 1998 Deborah Bräutigam
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Bräutigam, D. (1998). Development and Foreign Aid: Theory and Practice. In: Chinese Aid and African Development. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374300_2
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