Agricultural Neglect and Retarded Structural Change in Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa has followed a singular pattern of structural change that lags global trends and traps a large proportion of the workforce in low-productivity agriculture through a process of agricultural involution. This chapter focuses on the small land-rich crop-driven economies, which comprised the vast majority of sub-Saharan countries at independence. Baldwin’s yeoman farm model suggests that the diffuse linkages of such economies are advantageous for development, but his model neglects the need for resilient institutions and sound policy, which most countries lacked. The elite in sub-Saharan Africa abused crop marketing boards to extract rents from small farmers, converting the linkages from favourably diffuse to concentrated and theft-prone. Most economies traced staple trap trajectories and experienced growth collapses that, contrary to staple trap theory, failed to motivate the elite to promote diversified economic growth, with the exception of Mauritius. This chapter traces this policy failure to the prioritization of industrialization and associated persistent neglect of the potential development stimulus of agriculture.