African agriculture - IFIs not to blame

I am wondering how much more evidence on the pre-structural adjustment era and on structural adjustment needs to be created before our friends from the NGO community stop telling this misconceived story-line that everything was just fine in African agriculture, until the bad World Bank and IMF pressured the poor African governments into dismantling their “elaborate system of public agencies that provided farmers with access to land, credit, insurance inputs and cooperative organization.” (quote from the article).

If these systems were working so well and reached the smallholders with all these services, then why didn’t Africa have a small-holder based Green Revolution prior to structural adjustment? Why did agriculture fail to even keep pace with population growth? There is ample evidence that many of these “elaborate systems” the article refers to mainly served elites who appropriated large rents rather than reaching smallholders. To name just one source, the book by Djurfeld et al. (2005) on “The African Food Crisis - Lessons from the Asian Green Revolution” provides ample evidence on the large-farmer bias and the rent-seeking by bureaucrats that characterized agricultural policies on the continent. Independent “cooperative organization” of farmers, for example, was destroyed by authoritarian governments long before structural adjustment (as in the case of coffee farmers in Ghana).

So yes, agricultural spending has been reduced under structural adjustment, but why is the author not asking in whose pockets most of that expenditure had ended up the first place? It is also important to consider what governments actually did--as compared what they were portraying to do--under structural adjustment. As Jayne et al. (2002:1967) show for Eastern and Southern Africa, “many of the most fundamental elements of the reform programs either remain unimplemented, were reversed within several years, or were implemented in such a way as to negate private sector investment incentives.”

Other authors (Cooksey, Pletcher) also provide evidence on the same point. And van de Walle shows that many African governments and elites were quite well able to protect their own interests under structural adjustment. I would be the last one to defend the Bank’s role under structural adjustment or thereafter, and I think it is very important that NGOs criticize the Bank and IFPRI for whatever goes wrong. For example, I think it took the Bank far too long to move away from the position that “all subsidies are bad” to considering “market-smart subsidies.” And one can certainly criticize IFPRI for starting to research this topic only now. However, I wonder when the NGO community will finally start to acknowledge that one can’t blame international organizations alone - African governments themselves—especially those who were not accountable to their own people--have played an important role in the destruction of African agriculture, as well.

* Regina Birner is Senior Research Fellow International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
(for references, see below)