The African green revolution as a pro-poor policy instrument

Journal of International Development

J. Int. Dev. 14, 695–724 (2002)

Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jid.912

THE AFRICAN GREEN REVOLUTION ASA PRO-POOR POLICY INSTRUMENT

PAUL MOSLEY*

University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

Abstract: In opposition to a number of the presentations at the Conference, we argue that the

development of foodcrop agriculture needs to be considered as a pivotal poverty reduction

strategy in Africa—in spite of the sector’s erratic performance which has seen a number of

‘mini-green revolutions’ take off, falter and crash back to earth. We insist that for at least five

reasons—the scale-neutrality of hybrid seed technology, its labour-intensity, its tendency to

reduce risks, its ability to reduce the prices of poor people’s basic foods and its ability to

stimulate off-farm linkages—the hybrid seed revolution, partial though it has been, needs to be

supported and sustained, and not dismissed as fated to fail in African conditions. We support

this conclusion by two estimates of poverty impact of these ‘new’ technologies—a quick and

dirty estimate based on four channels of impact only (income of adopter households, labour

market, consumer prices and off-farm linkages) and an estimate derived from a multi-market

model of Uganda, in which about one-tenth of the poverty reduction achieved in Uganda since

1992 is ascribed to productivity change in maize and cassava. We note that a number of

domestic and aid policy factors—from weak rural infrastructure and financial systems to food

aid—have tended to reduce either the incentive to introduce new technologies, and/or the

poverty-elasticity of their introduction. To reduce many of the different poverties from which

Africa suffers, we argue, the policies responsible for the underdevelopment of its cereal crops

need coordinated reform across many countries; in preparing such reform, inspiration can be

taken from the policies which preceded the surge in agricultural productivity in India,

Indonesia and China 30 years ago. Copyright # 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

1 INTRODUCTION

The current and very welcome resurgence of commitment to anti-poverty policies differs

from previous global anti-poverty initiatives. In 1973, for example, under the stress of

famine in Ethiopia and Bangladesh, the World Bank and many bilateral donors1 launched

a pro-poor initiative which lasted the rest of the decade; its essential approach was a focus

on rural development, based on the premiss that it was rural activities, and in particular

Copyright # 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

*Correspondence to: Paul Mosley, Department of Economics, University of Sheffield, 9 Mappin Street, SheffieldS1 4DT, UK.1For the case of Britain see for example United Kingdom (1975).

the production of the food and water which provide the basis for survival, which

underpinned most poor people’s livelihoods. The main vehicle for support to the rural

sector was a range of ‘integrated rural development programmes’, designed as a

comprehensive attack on the market failures which caused rural poverty, often involving

an explicit attempt to spread the benefits from the productivity increases of the

Asian green revolution. As has increasingly become clear (Lipton, 1989; Singh, 1990;

Kerr and Kohlavalli, 1999), the Asian green revolution has tended to reduce poverty rather

than as first feared increase it, and needs to be seen as one of the main components of the

growth-with-equity achieved by the ‘east Asian miracle’, which has inspired so many

anti-poverty architects of later periods, in particular the 1990 World Development Report

(World Bank, 1990).

The dominant approach to poverty reduction, however, has now altered. In terms of

rhetoric, the tone of both the 2000–01 World Development Report and indeed of the

December 2000 DFID White Paper Making Globalisation Work for the Poor is one of

benign neglect of smallholder agriculture—in the White Paper, for example, agriculture as

a whole, on which 900 million poor people globally depend, is mixed into a two-page

section on natural resources as a whole (including fisheries, water development and

livestock); much less space than is allocated to the internet, on which no poor people

depend at all.2 Other writers have been more hostile; Jeffrey Sachs (1997) has suggested

that African countries abandon the attempt to develop a comparative advantage in grain

crops, and there is now an active debate, not least at the DSA conference where this paper

was originally presented, concerning ‘whether the African small farmer can survive’.3 At

the level of actions, the share of aid (OECD countries’ official development assistance)

allocated to agriculture has fallen from ‘about 20 per cent in the late 1980s to about 12

per cent today (March 2001)’.4 The actions of developing-country governments, with a

few exceptions which we shall examine below, have mirrored those of donors, and there

are few Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers5 containing any significant role for the

development of subsistence crops. All this suggests a shared view between aid donors

and the poorest-country governments who are their clients that whereas it was once crucial

to increase smallholder agricultural productivity as a precondition of eliminating poverty,

this is no longer the case.

This paper argues, with particular reference to Africa, that this view is mistaken, and

indeed that the realisation of the International Development Targets may depend on a

change of direction. In Section 2, we examine the patchy progress so far of technical

change in African smallholder agriculture in relation to resource scarcity and policy,

initiating here a set of country case-studies which are developed in more detail in the third

section. Here we examine in more detail the impact of such technical change on poverty in

Africa, using two alternative estimation methods, and on the basis of the results obtained

2Four pages of the White Paper (pp. 39–42) are allocated to the Internet and its developmental possibilities. TheWorld Development Report does provide a sympathetic treatment of the CG (Consultative Group for Interna-tional Agricultural Research) organizations as a ‘global public good’.3This question was asked in Simon Maxwell’s paper to the conference; in the presentations by Henry Bernsteinand Philip Woodhouse on southern Africa; and most particularly in the special issue of the Development PolicyReview (December 2001)4IFAD, 2001, p. iv.5The anti-poverty strategies contained in Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), which are intended to bewritten by the governments of very poor countries in wide consultation with poor people and organisationsworking with them, represent the key to unlocking debt cancellation and long-term aid facilities under the PovertyReduction and Growth Facility (PRGF), an instrument jointly managed by the IMF and the World Bank.

696 P. Mosley

Copyright # 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Int. Dev. 14, 695–724 (2002)

argue that, weak though the African green revolution has been, no serious anti-poverty

strategy can neglect the attempt to promote it. Section 4 considers four policy options for

doing this, and the concluding Section 5 examines the political economy of putting them

into practice.

2 THE CHARACTER OF THE AFRICAN GREEN REVOLUTION

The claims made in the introduction are stark, and it will be useful to begin by spelling out

the logic behind them. At least in Asia, the evidence suggests, the green revolution had the

following merits as a poverty reduction instrument:

(i) it raised yields;

(ii) specifically, it was able to do this among smallholder households as well as larger

farmers because modern varieties are scale-neutral—they do not require large areas

or accompanying indivisible inputs in order to raise yields;

(iii) in augmentation of this effect, modern varieties were additionally attractive to small

farmers because they were, in general, risk-reducing—the modern variety has greater

stability of yield in relation to the traditional variety. This is an unusual asset from the

point of view of poor farm households6—in most technical and financial environ-

ments, it is a basic parameter that to have higher yields, you have to accept higher

levels of risk. This claim holds good in most times and places as the consequence of

the development of strategies of breeding for disease and drought resistance over the

last 20 years (Lipton, 2001): but at times it breaks down if disease resistance breaks

down—e.g. when Ugandan cassava lost, during the early 1990s, the resistance to

cassava mosaic virus that had been bred into it during the previous decade. In the later

years of the decade, mosaic resistance, and with it the risk-reducing property, was

bred back in (Cockcroft, 1997); we return to this success story on page 713 below.

(iv) Modern varieties of foodcrops are labour-intensive, because of the greater demands

they impose on labour for weeding, harvesting and soil conservation; in other words

they are intensive in the sole factor of production which very poor people are

normally able to sell.7 Also within the labour market, effect (i) of raising yields raises

the supply price of labour within rural areas; this impact, which is visible in Africa

over a seventy-year time-span (Figure 1), has been a powerful impulse to poverty

reduction in South Asia (Singh, 1990), and potentially may act in this role in Africa

also.

(v) Increases in foodcrop yields, and more specifically production, lower the consumer

price of foodgrains and thus lower the cost of living for very poor people whose

expenditure pattern, more than that of any other group, consists of staple foods.

In relation to these claims, let us examine the actual achievement in Africa, such as it was.

(i) Yields. By comparison with other regions of the developing world African foodcrop

productivity is weak (Figure 2), but in absolute terms, and by comparison with previous

periods, the performance of the African foodcrop sector has been reasonably good in the

last 15 years, with an increase of 50 per cent in 1999 production over 1985. The secular

6In relation to the conference’s theme of ‘different poverties, different policies’, therefore, the claim is thatmodern varieties reduce vulnerability as well as simply headcount-poverty.7But not always in the labour of poor women (see Whitehead, 2001, also page (27) below).

The African Green Revolution 697


increase in African foodcrop yields, at 1.5 per cent per annum over the period 1950–99,

has been higher than in any previous period.8 For maize, the growth in African yields,

which in orthodox manner lagged well behind Asia during the 1960s, 70s and 80s, forged

ahead of Asia during the 1990s (Figure 3). However, there has been a tendency in Africa

for the technical transformation to be incomplete in the sense that investments in

Figure 1. Uganda, Kenya and Zimbabwe 1914–99: crop yields and real wage trends. In each graph,x-x represents the series of real wages and o-o-o represents the series of crop yields (in kg/ha).Sources: crop yields from Blue Books and Reports of the Chief Native Commissioner for 1910–63,thereafter from FAO Production Yearbook. Real wages are from sources are listed in Mosley 2000

(appendix)

8In South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya—the only countries for which we have data—crop yields in the 1950swere insignificantly different from the 1930s (Mosley, 1983, Ch. 5).

698 P. Mosley


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new seeds, although in many countries achieving almost an Asian level of coverage, have

been implemented stepwise and have not been complemented by the remainder of the Asian

package—fertilizer, irrigation and labour for weeding and soil conservation (Table 1).

Worse, such technical take-offs as have occurred have often not been sustained, but have

typically crashed back to earth after a few years: Figure 4 documents five cases which

will be taken up as case-study illustrations later on.

(ii) Scale-neutrality. Many commentators (van Zyl et al., 1995; Lipton, 1989) have

eloquently argued that green revolution innovations in Africa as well as Asia, are not just

scale-neutral but are actually adopted with greater effectiveness by small farmers. Our

own empirical findings (Figure 5) suggest this is indeed true at very low levels of farm size,

but that after a threshold of around 6–7 hectares is reached, the relationship flattens out and

becomes U-shaped, so that yields are higher on ‘large’ farms above this threshold than on

medium-sized farms. This relationship, also observed in Malawi by Dorward (1999) may,

we surmise, be due to capital constraints preventing smaller farmers from adopting the

complementary investments mentioned above.

(iii) Risk reduction. Figure 6 presents empirical evidence that most modern varieties in

most contexts that we have examined do indeed offer a ‘free lunch’—i.e. reduce risk and

increase yield at the same time.

(iv) Labour-intensity. There is now plenty of African evidence, also, to complement and

support the claim of Lipton (1989) and Singh (1990) that modern varieties of foodcrops are

Figure 3. Growth in maize yield in developing countries, 1961–97. Source: CIMMYT WorldMaize Facts and Trends 1997/98

700 P. Mosley


more labour-intensive than traditional varieties. Across the countries of Kenya, Malawi,

Uganda, Zimbabwe and Lesotho (Mosley, 2003, Table 4.10) we estimate average labour

input on traditional varieties of maize at 0.9 person-days per hectare and on modern

varieties as 1.9 person-days, difference between sample means significant at the 1 per cent

level. This is for a range of reasons: modern varieties produce bigger crops and therefore

require more labour for harvesting; labour-intensive practices such as deep ploughing, tie-

ridging, fertilizer application, minor irrigation and frequent weeding are most often

associated with the use of modern rather than traditional varieties; and modern varieties, as

just discussed, reduce risk, which in turn encourages the hiring of labour. It is necessary,

however, even at this stage to extend the warning that expansion of the demand for labour

does not necessarily lead to the creation of cash labour markets (let alone markets for

female labour) and therefore does not, as such, necessarily reach the core of African

chronic poverty. We return to this issue in Section 3.

(v) Consumer price effects. The green-revolution-induced production booms of Africa,

transient as many of them have been (Figure 3) have dramatically reduced prices on local

markets and thereby created an export market in foodcrops for several African countries:

South Africa and Cameroon consistently, Zimbabwe during the 1980s at least, and much

Table 1. Selected African and Asian countries: adoption rates for specified ‘green revolution’inputs

Country (least Cereal yields Modern varieties Fertiliser Irrigationdeveloped (1997–9) adoption rate, adoptioncountries (kg/ha) all cereals rate (kg/ha)in italics)

National Survey National Survey Nationaldata 1997 data data 1997 data data only

Africa

Cameroon 1274 30 3 0.5 3.0

Ethiopia 1205 9 10

Kenya 1535 56 54 41 14.5 1.4

Lesotho 1011 41 85 18

Malawi 1224 13 43 20.1

Mozambique 843 10

Nigeria 1207 56 84 18

Uganda 1247 70 6 2.4

South Africa 2216 88 59

Zambia 1585 50 16

Zimbabwe 1283 70 48 4.6

Sub-Saharan 6.3

Africa (survey countries) 1379 45 15

(LDCs listed) 1185 19 19

(overall estimate)* 1216 34 18

Asia

Bangladesh 2749

India 2250 45 72 29.5

Indonesia 3906 94 114 15.1

China 4888 301

Asia (overall estimate)* 3102 57 34.7

Source: National cereal yields from FAO Production Yearbook, 1999; national adoption rates for maize fromCIMMYT (1997–98). ‘Survey data’ refer to field surveys for 1997 reported in Mosley (forthcoming).*‘Overall estimate’ is a weighted average for all countries cited in CIMMYT’s World Maize Facts and Trends1997/8.



more recently Malawi (harvest of May–Sept 2000) and Uganda (harvest of Sept–Dec

2001). These dramatic reductions in consumer prices are of significance for most indices

of poverty since in the majority of cases of food shortage (Sen, 1981) it is the relationship

between the wage and the consumer price of staple foods which determines the extent of

malnutrition and, in the worst cases, famine.

Figure 4. Africa’s ‘aborted take-offs’: total cereals yield in five countries (three-year movingaverages)

702 P. Mosley


Explanatory Approaches: Boserup and Others

How to explain the between-country and over-time variations in adoption rates of different

inputs, and as a consequence in yields? A valuable starting-point is provided by the

induced-innovation theories proposed by Hayami and Ruttan (1970) and Boserup (1965).

These make a distinction between extensive methods of producing an agricultural

livelihood (increasing the cultivated area) and intensive methods (increasing the yield

available from a given area). The prediction of these theories is that the balance between

these methods will vary across times and places according to local resource availabilities

and policies. As land becomes scarcer in relation to other factors of agricultural production

(labour, seeds, equipment and so on), so it becomes economically rational to shift towards

techniques of production which use relatively intensively the factors of production which

have become less expensive—that is, to intensify production methods, thereby raising the

capital input and thus the yield per unit of land. As illustrated in Figure 7, the input of

capital (including new seeds) and other intensifying inputs rises from A to B as the price of

land relative to the prices of modern inputs rises from XX0 to YY0.Over the long period, probably the most important factor tending to make land scarce

and thereby force intensification is population pressure on the land—and this is the focus

of, in particular, the Boserup analysis.9 Much of the fact that Asia is further forward with

its green revolution than Africa can be explained in these simplistic population-pressure

terms—indeed, Africa currently has higher grain yields than Asia when Asia was at a

similar level of population pressure (Figure 8).

Figure 5. Five African countries: relationship between land-holding and yields, 1997 harvest/1999harvest. Source: Mosley (forthcoming)

9Boserup’s analysis was first published in 1965, just as the Asian green revolution was beginning, and inparticular focuses on the early stages of intensification via the shortening of fallow periods and the increased useof manures; rather than the later stage via the adoption of improved seeds, hired labour and irrigation. Its basicargument that population pressure is likely to induce land-saving innovations applies to all stages of intensifica-tion—including the green revolution, and the more recent shift, mianly in industrial countries, towards the use ofgenetically-modified seeds. However, the later stages of intensification may require more use of ‘lumpy’ capitalinputs. The new seeds of the green revolution, of course, are not particularly ‘lumpy’; but many of theaccompanying inputs, in particular fertiliser bags, irrigation and labour contracts, may be. This appears to havebrought about ‘stepwise’ patterns of adoption in LDCs (see Table 3 above)



By the same token, smallholder cereal yields within individual countries are generally

higher in the more densely populated districts of individual countries—for example, SW

Kenya, coastal Cameroon, northern Tanzania, north-central Zimbabwe, the eastern

mountain zone of Uganda.

It is important, however, not to see intensification as an inevitable response to popu-

lation pressure or any other factor tending to increase the relative scarcity of land. For one

thing, more profitable responses may be available, which do not involve the intensification

of agriculture and may involve its actual depletion; a classical example of this is Lesotho,

whose nearness to much more profitable income opportunities in South Africa has over a

hundred years deprived the country’s agriculture of much of its potential labour force and

much of its ability to adopt ‘intensifying’ responses. For another thing, intensification

increasingly—as we move into phases which increasingly require expensive, lumpy and

Figure 6. Five African countries: yield in relation to riskness (coefficient of variation). Data fromsample surveys indicated by Mosley (forthcoming); HP¼ high-potential area sampled, LP¼ low-

potential area sampled

704 P. Mosley


knowledge-intensive inputs—requires complementary factors of production, without

which serious increases in productivity cannot take place. These are as follows.

Knowledge and awareness—the research system needs to be able to produce improved

seed varieties, the seed industry needs to make them commercially available, and farm

households need to be aware of the intensifying technologies which exist, either through

extension services or otherwise, in order to adopt them.10 From this point of view the

narrow and probably decreasing-over-time coverage of government extension services

Figure 7. Simple induced innovation, after Boserup 1965

Figure 8. Asia and Africa: yields in relation population density, 1970–95

10Boserup acknowledges, in an aside, that she is well aware of this possibility:

If it is true, as suggested here, that certain types of technical change will occur only when a certain density ofpopulation has been reached, it of course does not follow, conversely, that this technical change will occurwhenever the demographic prerequisite is present. It has no doubt happened in many cases that a population,faced with a critically increasing density, was without knowledge of any types of fertilisation techniques. Theymight then shorten the period of fallow without any other changes in methods. This constellation wouldtypically lead to a decline of crop yields and sometimes to an exhaustion of land resources. The populationwould then have to face the choice between starvation and migration’. (Boserup, 1965, p. 41)



and, even more, their bias against women farmers who are responsible for most of the

production decisions appears as a serious constraint to adoption (Saito, 1994; Mosley,

2000). To some extent, not at present covered by our data, these declines in government

services have been compensated by increasing NGO provision, some of it quite specialist

(e.g. the Sasakawa Foundation).

Availability of finance—some of the indivisible factors of production, such as labour and

equipment, may be ‘desirable in principle’ in the sense that they offer a positive expected rate

of return, but simply not be affordable on account of liquidity constraints—because rural

capital markets are very imperfect.11 The barrier in this case is lack of a source of finance for

small quantities of investment capital. (A classic illustration is southern Mozambique

and the African reserves of South Africa from the 1920s on, where population pressure

rapidly built up but intensification did not occur because it could not be afforded and higher-

earning alternatives to agriculture existed; Bundy, Knight and Lenta, 1980). The source of

investment capital, here, may be an off-farm income source such as remittances or self-

employment—alternatively it may be a formal or informal lending institution.

Protection against risk—if intensification looks too risky, because it is perceived as

imposing on the rural household a level of vulnerability which it does not want to accept,

then intensification will not occur, even if its expected rate of return is positive. The risks

may arise from technological uncertainty, from financial exposure, or from fears about

policy—we have documented a historical case from Kenya and Zimbabwe in the 1930s

(Mosley, 1982) where deviations from the ‘Boserup’ regression line relating population

pressure and grain yields can be explained by fears of land confiscation or other

government counter-move. The barrier in this case is lack of formal or informal

institutions which insure against risk. If intensification is not undertaken, the household

livelihood still needs to be protected, and the response, depending on the remaining

options, may be extensification, exit (migration) and/or asset diversification (Ellis, 1998).

Finally it is necessary to draw attention to certain external shocks which can shatter the

possibility of an intensive response even if all other circumstances are favourable to

intensification. These are war and civil conflict (which has seriously disrupted infra-

structure and agricultural production in about half of all least developed countries,

especially in Africa but also elsewhere (e.g. Afghanistan and Cambodia) and the AIDS

epidemic, about which almost exactly the same can be said except that perhaps its worst

consequences are localised in Southern Africa and affect women and children even more

than men. They are of course particularly vital to the agricultural labour force, and we

argue below that the dip in agricultural productivity observed in the 1990s in Lesotho,

Zambia and Zimbabwe, in particular, owes a good deal to the influence of AIDS.

The picture thus inevitably becomes more complex. For the simple ‘intensifying’ or

‘green revolution’ response—the movement from A to B, in Figure 7—to take place,

certain complementary factors are required (we have highlighted availability of finance,

control of risk and availability and awareness of the relevant technologies); exit is always

an option; and the whole process is vulnerable to external shocks.12 The clean and simple

11see Hulme and Mosley (1996: Chapter 1).12Reardon et al. add the gloss that intensification itself can be of two different kinds—‘capital-led’ and‘capital-deficient’ according to their terminology (or ‘regressive’ in the terminology of Lele and Stone(1989)), with the latter type of intensification consisting mostly of labour inputs and causing environmentaldepletion, through destruction of trees, soil mining etc., with the implication that short-term yields will be inexcess of long-term yields.

706 P. Mosley


process which Boserup and the induced-innovation theorists see as emerging sponta-

neously from a free market is vulnerable, in the environment of Africa and the least

developed countries, to road-blocks induced essentially by imperfections in the markets

for capital and risk-bearing, for labour and for knowledge. If these blockages are to be

removed, either government policy, or some alternative agency such as an NGO, needs to

either remove them or find a way around them. In other words, there is a need for policy-

induced innovation—intensification triggered by policy actions and institutional innova-

tions which seek to compensate for the market failures summarised above. Some of these

actions and innovations will be discussed in Section 3.

This more elaborate picture is presented in Figure 9. The isoquant and price lines are

simply transcribed from Figure 7, but we now add a risk constraint, in the left-hand part of

the figure, and allow the budget constraint to move inwards or outwards as the financial

constraint is tightened or relaxed. The consequence of adding these bells and whistles is

that the ‘transition from A to B’—the process of intensification—occurs if and only if

finance for indivisible inputs is available and if the household economy is not projected

into the ‘unsafe zone’ where the probability of a disaster level of income rises above the

Figure 9. Risk and yield in small-farm agriculture. The point D is defined as a ‘disaster’ level ofincome or well-being, and the line DE, drawn at an angle of 67.5 degrees to the horizontal, defines a‘safe region’ in which the actual level of income is always at least two standard deviations away fromthe ‘disaster level’. Any change in the optimum technology’ (e.g. from A to B in the right-hand partof the diagram) which involves a movement into the no-go, or excessive risk, area in the left-handpart, will not take place. Thus with the land/purchased inputs ratio at PP’, B is the best technologyfrom a productivity point of view, but the corresponding level of risk is excessive, and for this reason,

the level of inputs adopted is the lower-yield level GG0



tolerable level (here given as 5 per cent).13 If either of these things happens (or if there is

an extraneous shock such as civil disturbance or AIDS), the ‘green revolution’ technical

response is simply thwarted, and yields stagnate; on this view, if necessity is the mother of

invention, then the wicked uncles are risk aversion; capital shortage; perverse price

incentives, often conveyed through aid; and, of course external shocks.

We need to put this view of the world to the test, and seek to do so initially by cross-

section regression methods applied to data on the growth in cereals yield (from the late 70s

to the late 90s), and all the independent variables in the model of Figure 9, bar the risk

aversion parameter, which can only be estimated at an individual and not a national level.

This approach is applied to a sample of 31 least developed countries including a few not in

Africa. At this cross-national level, yield data often blur the reality by aggregating across

several climatic and agronomic zones; they are also compiled by methods which contain

plenty of scope for arbitrary judgments. This should be borne in mind in interpreting the

regression equation which follows (Table 2). This suggests that the simple ‘Boserup’

relationship between population pressure and yields holds at the level of two-variable

correlation, both for the sample as a whole and (slightly more weakly) for African LDCs;

however, the relationship falls apart, in the sense that the population pressure coefficient

becomes insignificant, once the access to finance, war dummy and AIDS dummy variables

are added in. Access to finance is the strongest and most significant of these influences, or

‘road-blocks’ which intervene between population pressure and yields.

For full data arrays and more detail on sources please see Appendix 1 of Mosley (2002).

These factors explain many of the ‘outliers’ from the general pattern (Figure 10):

Malawi has higher yield growth than the regression predicts due to better availability

of (micro) finance; Zambia and Zimbabwe have lower growth than the norm in the

1990s on account of AIDS, cuts in agricultural services and (in the last of these

cases) a botched land reform.

3 A FIRST ASSESSMENT OF POVERTY IMPACT

For the reasons mentioned in the previous section—especially the scale-neutrality, risk-

reduction and labour-intensifying properties of the green revolution—we would expect

technical intensification in agriculture to have a dramatic negative effect on poverty. But

what is happening on the ground? The emergence of new data on poverty—indeed many

different poverties—since the late 1980s has made it possible to answer the question with

13What is here presented as a straightforward response to risk is in fact the reduced form of a game—againstnature, against other people and against institutions including the government. In the simplest form of this game,those who are risk-averse refuse to accept any option (e.g. fertilizer) which puts the household’s livelihood at riskif ‘nature’ turns out badly, i.e. low rainfall—and if those who are most-risk-averse are those who are poorest, thenonly the richer innovate and take the gains from innovation, which implies progressively increasing inequality ofincome distribution (Weeks, 1971). But the game is against other individuals also—for example, against co-members of one’s borrower group (Hulme and Mosley, 1996, Ch. 4), or against government (Mosley, 1982), askeeping production low may be a means of pre-empting policies of forcibly turning the terms of trade againstagriculture. Finally, the allocation of agricultural labour time between men and women can also be represented asa game (Jones, 1983; Osmani, 1998; Mosley, 2000b), whose outcome determines the labour supply function andthus the distribution of gains from the labour market between men and women and the poverty level. The GreenRevolution as a whole, indeed, has been successfully modelled as a simulation game, to be enacted over two days(Chapman, 1985), both in an Asian version with surplus labour and an ‘African’ version with surplus land, andthis would not be a bad way of formalising and testing some of the propositions about distributional impactoffered here.

708 P. Mosley


Tab

le2

.T

ests

of

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ple

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ified

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ose

rup

hy

po

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es

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enden

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ion

coef

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ents

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reg

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onal

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31

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.01

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4)

0.1

4(0

.10

)2

.68*

*(4

.64

)�

6.8

4(0

.54

)4

.53

(0.4

3)

6.7

4(0

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a little more confidence than before. The data are still full of gaps and open to dispute; for

example, in Zambia, poverty is falling according to IFAD (2001), but rising according to

the measure of the World Bank (2000), whereas in Nigeria it is the opposite way round.

Although both sources present the data with appropriate health warnings, the tone of the

World Bank report is generally more optimistic (particularly in relation to the likelihood of

the OECD poverty targets being reached); indeed IFAD argue (2001, p. 38) that ‘most of

Africa (except Ethiopia and Uganda) has seen little poverty reduction since the late 1970s’.

What is the relation between trends in agricultural productivity and poverty? Focussing

on the success cases first, it is possible among low-income countries to identify two major

patterns of poverty reduction associated with agricultural change, as illustrated by Table 3.

One, ‘intensification’—the green revolution pattern, or the movement from A to B in

Figure 7—is found in south-western Kenya, eastern Uganda, north-central Malawi, much

of northern Nigeria, northern Tanzania, most of Rwanda and Burundi, increasingly in

some of the South African former homelands. In all of these regions, there is evidence of

poverty reduction, to be further analysed below. However, this is not the only route to rural

poverty reduction. The other pattern, ‘extensification’ or an increase in the area cultivated,

is found especially in Ethiopia, Zambia, eastern and Rift Valley Kenya, Lesotho and

northern Ghana; this has been associated with substantial poverty reduction in the 1990s in

Ethiopia and possibly Zambia also. Intensification, as this demonstrates, is not a necessary

condition of poverty reduction; neither is it a sufficient condition, as illustrated by the case

of Zimbabwe, which until recently has had almost 100 per cent hybrid seed utilization but

nonetheless, under the stress of deteriorating macroeconomic management, has shown

negative economic growth and increasing poverty levels over the past 15 years.

Figure 10. Regression of population pressure on yields (1979–81 to 1997–99) and outliers. Source:as for Table 2. Data arrays are in Appendix 1 of Mosley (2002)

710 P. Mosley


We wish to better understand the effects of agricultural development, especially via the

‘intensification’ route, on poverty reduction, and seek to do this via two methodologies.

The first ‘quick and dirty’ approach seeks to measure the effects of technical change on

poverty via four channels only:

(i) Effects of technical change on the productivity, thus the incomes, of individual culti-

vators. The productivity-increasing effects of modern (hybrid) varieties may increase

household incomes to the point of raising particular individuals over the poverty line.

(ii) Effects transmitted through the labour market. Modern varieties produce larger crops

and therefore require more labour for harvesting; labour-intensive practices such as

deep ploughing, soil conservation, fertilizer application and frequent weeding are often

associated with the use of modern varieties and much less often associated with the use

of traditional varieties; irrigation, if used, enables multiple cropping in many dry areas,

thus creating a large boost in labour use. Finally, modern varieties generally reduce

yield variability and therefore the uncertainty associated with the hiring of labour.

(iii) Effects transmitted through the prices of grains and other products consumed by poor

people. If technical change reduces the price of key items in the consumption baskets

of poor people, their real incomes increase. This effect has been found to be crucial in

the Asian green revolution, and has been a key political motivation impelling the

mass import of new seeds by Asian governments.

(iv) Effects transmitted through linkages from agriculture to non-agricultural activities. If

the consumption linkages (incremental demand for consumption goods produced by

income increases under (i) to (iii) and the production linkages (incremental demands

for agricultural inputs) resulting from increases in agricultural productivity generate

income increases, these will, to the extent that they take people out of poverty, add to

the poverty reduction channels listed under (i) to (iii) above. Again, these have proved

extremely important channels of poverty reduction in India and China, where the

Table 3. Poverty reduction (1980–99) among very poor countries by pattern of agricultural change

Some or major No or negativepoverty reduction* poverty reduction

Intensification (green revolution) Uganda Zimbabwe (1990s)

Bangladesh Cambodia

Kenya (Central and Southwest)

Pakistan (Punjab)

Indonesia

Malawi

Zambia

Extensification or involution Mozambique Burkina Faso

(no or insignificant Ethiopia Lesotho

green revolution) Tanzania Niger

Most South African smallholder

areas

Source:*Poverty reduction trends from IFAD 2001, Table 2.7, p. 39. Period over which poverty reduction isassessed is 1980–99, unless otherwise specified.Pattern of agricultural change: from FAO Production Yearbooks. Countries are classified as ‘intensifying’ if theirrate of productivity change in cereals, 1987–98, is more than 1 per cent per annum.Bold type denotes that the LDC in question is featured as a case-study in this paper.



growth of the rural non-farm sector has by a large margin exceeded the growth of

farm production.

This approach, although serviceable, is indeed quick and dirty. It essentially examines

effects in only three markets—for foodcrops, for labour markets and for ‘linkage

activities’. In this way many effects—such as those operating through capital markets

and the prices of other agricultural products—are omitted. Our second method of impact

assessment is intended, in principle, to compensate for some of these deficiencies. It aims

to examine the impacts of increases in foodcrop productivity as they ramify through all

markets and not just the three mentioned above. This approach is applied in one country

only (Uganda); the results are derived from McKay and Mosley (2001).

In Table 4, the two alternative approaches to the assessment of poverty impact of

intensification are set out side by side.

The provisional finding is that (using the quick and dirty method, and averaging across

the six countries for which we have survey data) the adoption of improved foodcrop

technologies knocked 0.45 per cent (about one half of a percentage point) off the

headcount index of poverty over the years 1998–2000. For Uganda, we can be a little

more precise. The multi-market method yields a cut in the headcount index of 0.4 per cent

over 1998–2000, whereas the ‘quick and dirty’ method yields a cut of 0.7 per cent. (The

discrepancy is not unexpected, as the current version of the multi-market model lacks a

labour market, which appears from the table to be one of the most important causes of

poverty impact). If we average across these two methods of calculation, we get a cut of

0.55 per cent, which may be compared with an estimated reduction of six percentage

points in the headcount index of poverty across those same two years (Government of

Uganda, 2001). It thus appears as if about one-tenth of the remarkable reduction in poverty

which has been observed in Uganda may be due to the green revolution simply in maize

and cassava, and ignoring other crops.14 In our paper on this episode (McKay and Mosley,

Table 4. Poverty impact of the African green revolution: summary of results from alternativeapproaches

Channel of impact Impact of modern varieties Sourceadoption over two years (generally1998–2000) on headcount index P0

‘Quick and dirty’ method:

1. Cereal producers’ incomes �14,000 (0.2%) Mosley, 2002: Table 7

2. Labour market �5930 (0.1%) Mosley, 2002: Table 9

3. Crop price effects �1520 (0.05%) Mosley, 2002: Table 10

4. Linkage effects �12,000 (0.1%) Mosley, 2002: Table 11 a

(i) Estimated total impact- �33,450 (0.45%) Mosley, 2002: Tables 14 and 15

quick and dirty method

(average for six countries)

(Uganda only) �47,000 (0.7%) Mosley, 2002: Tables 7, 9, 10 and 11

(ii) Estimated total impact- �27,000 (0.4%) Mosley, 2002: Table 16

CGE method (Uganda only):

14An important component in this process has been the location of the cassava revolution mainly in the northernareas of Uganda, which had received a relatively small poverty dividend from previous growth (see Appleton,1998; see also pp. 713–714 below).

712 P. Mosley


2001) we describe this contribution to poverty reduction as ‘modest’, and stand by this

description. Nonetheless, if modest it is useful, and it could also, with the right policies and

institutions, be dramatically expanded. We now wish to explore what those policies and

institutions are, in relation to the sad history of ‘incomplete and often aborted take-off’

revealed in Table 2 and Figure 3. We approach these questions in two steps. First, we shall

tell four anecdotes—of two countries which belatedly achieved their green revolutions in

the late 1990s, Uganda and Malawi; one (Ethiopia) which has scarcely achieved one at all

but has achieved major reductions in poverty, and a fourth, Zimbabwe, which after earlier

success fell as the first three rose. On the basis of this material, linked in with the

regressions of Table 3, we then offer a more general explanation of what needs to be

changed at the policy level.

Case Study 1. Poverty Reduction through Intensification—North and East Uganda

During the ‘lost decades’ of generally failed adjustment in the 1980s and 1990s,

poverty rose dramatically across Africa as a whole (World Bank, 2000, Table 1.1). But

in Uganda, it fell just as dramatically: according to the latest estimate (Uganda, 2001)

from 56 per cent to 32 per cent over the eight years from 1992 to 2000. Even the other

fast-growing countries of Africa—such as Botswana, Lesotho and Ghana—have not

seen poverty reduction of this magnitude. How has it been achieved?

The evidence points to the following factors as having been important:

* Effective and stable policy. There has been a movement towards the free market—

especially for coffee farmers, who now receive a far higher share of the export price

than in the 1980s—but not a headlong rush. Even more importantly, public

expenditure has been pro-poor—focussed on primary health and education,

agricultural research and extension, and rural infrastructure, which were exempted

from cuts during the period of severe retrenchment in 1991–94. Within food-crop

research, there have been two notable successes: the development, in the late 1980s,

of an improved maize variety (Longe 1) which outyields traditional varieties across a

large range of agronomic environments, and the development, in the middle 1990s,

of cassava varieties resistant to mosaic virus. Longe (from Namulonge) 1 is a

composite (open-pollinated) maize variety, designed to be readily acceptable by

small farmers and relatively drought-resistant; some yield is lost thereby but on good

soils e.g. in Mbale district regularly yields 5–6 tonnes per hectare on farmers’ fields.

* An intensifying response to land shortage—particularly in the heavily populated

southwest and east. Across the whole of Uganda total cereals yields are estimated to

have risen from 1070 to 1350 kg/ha15 and cassava yields to have nearly tripled from

3800 to 9100 kg/ha between 1969–71 and 1997–99, in the latter case almost entirely

as the result of the introduction of new mosaic-resistant cassava varieties over the

latter half of the nineties.16 These trends are estimated, using CGE methods, to have

15Probably above 11000 kg/ha in 2001 (Background to the Budget 2001).16Adoption of mosaic-resistant cassava varieties is believed to have gone from zero in 1993 to more than85 per cent in 1999 (The New Vision, Kampala, 9 June 1999).



Case Study 2. Poverty Reduction through Extension of the CultivatedArea—Ethiopia

led to a reduction in poverty of half of one percentage point (see Table 4), much of it

in the northern districts which (Appleton, 1998) missed out on the general trend

towards poverty reduction in the middle nineties.

* Diversified provision of microfinance, which has not been reluctant, as in many low-

income African and Asian countries, to go into small-farm foodcrop agriculture, and

has been successful there, witness the success of Centenary Bank’s agricultural

lending scheme, which at end 2000 had default rates of under 3 per cent, less than

the average for the Bank as a whole.

* A constructive dialogue with aid donors—who tolerated President Museveni’s

flirtation with fixed exchange rates in the mid-1980s and with a coffee export tax in

1994, believing it more important to encourage a basically enlightened political

leadership to find its own salvation than to hassle it over details. Where

conditionality has been used—as it frequently has, for example in setting up the

Programme against Poverty and the Social Costs of Adjustment (PAPSCA)—it has

generally been by the provision of carrots rather than sticks.

In Ethiopia, the other African LDC to have achieved significant poverty reduction since

the mid-1980s (from 61 to 45 per cent between 1989 and 1995 according to Dercon

(1999), the route adopted towards poverty reduction has been quite different. One

commonality with Uganda is a restructuring of public expenditure in a more pro-poor

direction, with a reduced arms budget and a much higher agricultural services budget.17

However, the pattern of agricultural adaptation has been quite different: by contrast

with Uganda, only 7 per cent of the total cereals acreage was under modern varieties in

1996 (CIMMYT Annual Report, 1997). Rather, agricultural growth and poverty

reduction have been achieved by a large extension of the sown area, without any

significant increase in yields.

Dercon’s analysis of poverty reduction in Ethiopia (1995, p. 1) suggests that, around

the general trend of declining poverty, the most rapid escape was achieved by those

with substantial land and education, male headed households ‘and especially those with

access to good infrastructure’.

In terms of policy implications, Dercon argues that ‘harvest failure, mainly linked to

the weather, and increasingly labour supply problems, mainly related to illness, are

seen as causes of poverty. This has important consequences for agricultural and health

policy’. To be more helpful for the poor, the former should more focus on risk and

fluctuations in agriculture, rather than just growth in output, while more effort should

be made to improve effective access to health care to the poor.

17One version of this story, told by Joseph Stiglitz at a public lecture in Manchester on 4 April 2001, ascribes thismore rational pattern of public expenditure to the influence of an Open University MBA taken by Meles Zenawiand his entire cabinet in 1994–95! see Sliglitz (2001).

714 P. Mosley


Case Study 3. Malawi—Success after Two False Starts18

Seen in a strictly short-term perspective, Malawi is one of the successes of the African

green revolution, with an average cereals yield of 1.7 tons/hectare in 1999 and 2000

(1.8 tons/hectare for maize, which is the dominant crop), higher than most of

smallholder Africa; but it is an unlikely success, having struggled through much of

the 1980s with problems in persuading smallholders to adopt hybrid varieties, and

through much of the 1990s with problems in the system of smallholder finance.

Malawi emerged from the colonial period with a research programme and seed

industry still heavily enmeshed in the South-Central African regional economic system,

and for many years the main recommended maize variety was the pioneering

Zimbabwean hybrid SR(for Southern Rhodesia)52—see the Zimbabwe case study

below. The Banda government maintained through the 1970s and 80s a policy structure

heavily supportive of the expansion of smallholder maize, featuring heavy investment

in research, a producer price guaranteed by the marketing agency well above export

parity, a subsidy on smallholder purchases of fertilizer and a government-financed

smallholder agricultural credit administration—all of the last three in defiance of

advice from the World Bank during the 1980s to return to a more free-market

dominated pricing regime. However, the early varieties produced by the Malawian

national agricultural research system—MH10 and MH12 in the 1980s—experienced

difficulty in being accepted by smallholders on account of their post-harvest character-

istics—they were of a hard (dent) type, which tasted less good and so sold at a price

discount, a common enough problem with all hybrids, but were also very difficult to

process in smallholder hammer-mills, a serious problem in an environment where most

maize was milled on-farm for home consumption (Kydd, 1989). As a consequence

smallholder hybrid adoption rates through the 1980s remained low, at around 10

per cent by contrast with over 90 per cent in neighbouring Zimbabwe, and yields stayed

low, at around 1100 kg/ha.

In the late 1980s the research system was able to produce new flint-type hybrids

(MH17 and MH18) which were much easier to mill and found much wider acceptance;

but at this point a belated implementation of structural adjustment took hold, partly

under the stress of the 1992 drought, which within a few years eliminated the

smallholder fertiliser subsidy and decimated the smallholder agricultural credit system.

These shocks—now, as earlier discussed, aggravated by AIDS—took away with the

left hand much of what the research system was now able to give with its right hand,

and just as there began to be widespread talk of a ‘smallholder green revolution’, with

yields up to 1.5 tons/ha in 1993, they fell back to 0.9 tons in 1997, not a drought year.

However, Malawi has experienced a third coming since 1997, partly under the

stimulus of very large aid inflows—for Malawi is now, with Mozambique, the darling

of all aid donors. These aid inflows have somewhat compensated for structural

adjustment-induced cuts and maize yields for 1997–2000, at an average of 1.8 tons/

ha, are now about 60 per cent above the average level for the 1980s. Poverty data for

Malawi are not yet good, but the headcount estimate, using the national poverty line, is

estimated to have come down from 54 per cent in 1990–91 (World Development Report

18This success may already be fading. At the time of going in press Malawi and other Southern African countrieswere again threatened by famine. To what extent this reflects failures in the production system is not yet known.



Case Study 4. Zimbabwe—Decline and Fall of a Pioneer

2000–01, Table 4) to about 49 per cent in 2000. These figures are not remotely as

impressive as the Ugandan ones; but much more of the poverty reduction which has

taken place is likely to be due to productivity change in foodcrops in Malawi, with its

relatively undiversified economy, than in Uganda.

During the 1980s—at any rate from 1980 to 1986, Zimbabwe was at the spearhead of

the smallholder green revolution in Africa. During those first six years after indepen-

dence, yields and production doubled, almost entirely on the back of a foodcrop boom

made possible by increased production of maize and sorghum in the smallholder

(‘communal’) areas,19 augmented by land transferred from the large commercial farms

under aid-financed purchases. This boom was supported by heavy government invest-

ment in both physical infrastructure (notably roads and grain stores) and smallholder

finance, most of this supplied not by NGOs but by the government’s Agricultural

Finance Corporation(AFC) under both individual and group lending arrangements—

the latter a pioneering adaptation to Africa of the Grameen Bank model of Bangladesh.

The boom, alongside policies of price liberalization, enabled the consumer price of

maize and small grains both in Zimbabwe and in some neighbouring markets (e.g.,

Malawi and Mozambique) to be brought down both absolutely and as a fraction of the

real wage, and thus reduced poverty by indirect as well as direct routes. The process

generated great euphoria at the time and there is quite a substantial literature

chronicling its achievements (Rohrbach, 1989; Thirtle et al., 1992; Eicher, 1995).

Like most green revolutions in Africa, this one duly fell apart from the late 1980s

onward, but for somewhat distinctive reasons. In common with Malawi, there was a

belated structural adjustment, causing infrastructural investment and AGRITEX

extension services to be cut and AFC disbursements to fall to one-third of their 1986

level by 1993 (Mosley, 2000). But by contrast with Malawi, serious problems of

governance had emerged by the 1990s; large amounts of public expenditure were

misdirected into military operations in the Congo, and a vicious circle began of

attempts to win political support by dictating terms to the multinationals and

commercial farms, followed by capital flight, followed by decline in living standards,

followed finally by further populist attempts to restore by vigorous anti-foreign

capitalist action political support that was being eroded by economic decline. The

latest of these was an attempt to impose a second wave of land reform by force in 2000,

met by a virtual withdrawal of aid flows; but by now macro-economic decline (of 6 per

cent in 2000) was impinging on the rural micro-economy, and many small farmers were

now too poor to buy hybrid from the seed companies, preferring instead to replant their

own seed, with a consequent decline in yields; the FAO/CIMMYT estimate is that these

19By 1985 smallholder adoption of hybrid seeds was pronounced by CIMMYT to be almost 100 per cent, contrastthe Malawi case. The rapid transfer of improved seed varieties was facilitated by the ability of the government totake ‘off the shelf’ varieties which had been developed for commercial-farming areas—initially the long-seasonand pioneering SR52 but, even before 1980, the short-season R201. Research in the 1980s and early 90s, both innational research stations and in ICRISAT, was substantially to add to the range of risk-reducing short-seasonvarieties of hybrid maize and sorghum.

716 P. Mosley


had fallen from 1488 kg/ha in 1989–91 to 1132 in 1997–99, and hybrid seed utilization

from over 95 to about 70 per cent. As in Malawi (see also Table 2 above) AIDS has

entered this vicious circle, depleting adult rural labour inputs, reducing population

pressure and further depleting yields. At the time of writing (March 2002) a rigged

election has further augmented the scope for potential political disturbance. Zimbabwe

is the African country for which the IFAD report records the severest decline in overall

poverty,20—a tragic reminder that a green revolution can be thrown into reverse, and

poverty increase as a consequence.

These anecdotes already provide us with some raw material for understanding the

‘boom to bust’ character of many African green revolutions, a challenge which will be

taken up in our final section. For the moment, we derive from them the following

hypotheses concerning ways in which poverty impact may be increased:

(i) The sectoral pattern of public expenditure may be vital. Agricultural expenditure

has a significant coefficient on poverty in the regressions of Mosley and Hudson

(2002); and in both Uganda and Ethiopia, poverty started to decline sharply in the

early 90s after the pattern of public expenditure became pro-poor, involving a

focus on agricultural research and extension. By contrast, in Zimbabwe, poverty

increased in the early nineties after structural adjustment had caused sharp cuts in

agricultural credit and extension.

(ii) Finance and insurance may be crucial to the acquisition of modern inputs—

especially those which Table 1 shows as being particularly lacking in Africa,

fertiliser, irrigation, and labour. Finance causes significant deviations of yields

from the ‘Boserup regression line’ in Figure 10, and in our case studies,

microfinance density has been important in pushing up agricultural yields in

Uganda and Malawi; more evidence in this direction is contained in Chapter 3 of

Mosley (forthcoming). In most countries of Asia, acquisition of modern varieties

and complementary inputs has been driven by micro-loans, often provided by

purpose-built offshoots of a state-owned bank (e.g. India, Indonesia, and China).

(iii) It is very clear that the shallowness of cash labour markets in Africa has inhibited

the spread and the poverty-reducing potential of the green revolution; but in those

areas earlier mentioned as green revolution lead areas—southwestern Kenya,

eastern Uganda, southwest Ethiopia—agricultural labour markets are active, and

poverty is falling faster than elsewhere, though often much more among men than

among women, because of the poor absorption of women into the cash labour

market (Mosley, forthcoming, Ch. 4). As illustrated by Figure 1 above, rural real

wages have historically been tightly linked with, and provided a ‘multiplier’ to,

exits from poverty occasioned by the income gains of farm households who

experience increases in productivity. If the ability to hire labour is constrained by

availability of capital, this blockage to poverty alleviation interrelates with the

previous one. Again, the Asian comparison is relevant: Singh (1990) calculates

that in North India in the 1970s, the expansion of labour markets was the dominant

factor driving down poverty, much more significant than direct benefits to

cultivators and their families.

20This—an increase in rural poverty from 51 to 63 per cent—is based on the Kinsey study of 385 ruralhouseholds, running from 1992–93 to 1997–98.



4 REQUIRED POLICIES FOR MAKING THE GREENREVOLUTION ‘MORE PRO-POOR’

Let us now consider ways in which the above approaches might be operationalised,

together with relevant evidence about their possible effectiveness.

The Sectoral Pattern of Public Expenditure

We have argued elsewhere (Mosley and Hudson, 2002, Tables 3 and 4) that a key

determinant of the pro-poor capacity of governments is the mix of public expenditure and,

specifically, the share of agricultural expenditure within that total. Within this, particular

components are especially important, notably agricultural research and extension whose

reach, especially to the women who do most of the agricultural work, remains limited to a

small minority.21 This has been appreciated by Asian governments which have almost

everywhere, although in varying styles, supported smallholder agriculture with a package

consisting of credit from state institutions, subsidised inputs, extension support and

sometimes storage and marketing assistance. In most cases, African governments, lacking

the fiscal resources, have not aspired to match this package; and even those measures of

support which were put in place during the seventies disappeared during the age of

structural adjustment, such as the Malawi fertilizer subsidy, which was explicitly intended

to benefit smallholders (see further case study 3 above). Two exceptions to this generally

liberal approach exist: Zimbabwe in the early to middle 1980s and South Africa in the late

80s to middle 90s. In both countries, African smallholder agriculture was saturation-

bombed with essentially the same range of services as those mentioned above, supplied on

an integrated basis and mediated in Zimbabwe through the Agricultural Finance Corpora-

tion and AGRITEX (the Department of Agricultural, Technical and Extension Services),

and in South Africa through the Farmer Support Programme administered by the

Development Bank of Southern Africa. In both countries the yield response was

immediate and dramatic (see Figure 3), with a doubling of smallholder cereal output in

Zimbabwe between 1980 and 1986 and in South Africa between 1988 and 1993. But in

neither country could the fiscal resources required to sustain smallholder credit and

extension, in face of pressures for structural adjustment and poor loan recovery rates

(Mosley, forthcoming, Ch. 6) be continued beyond five years; after 1986, Zimbabwe fell

into the downward spiral described in Case Study 4 and South Africa, less dramatically,

lowered the priority given to smallholder agriculture and handed the responsibility for its

support to regional administrations, in both cases with severely negative consequences for

poverty (Figure 4 above).

The lesson from these cases is that where public expenditure is mobilised to support

smallholder agriculture (on a long-term basis in Uganda and Ethiopia and on a short-term

basis in South Africa and Zimbabwe), agricultural output, and poverty levels, respond.

Such mobilisation, especially in South Africa and Zimbabwe, was driven by political fears

of rural revolt unless something were done to reduce a sense of exclusion among small

farmers, even more than by the perceived cost of food imports. To augment the support

21Across four countries for which we have data (Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania) the proportion of farmershaving access to extension services is estimated at between 15 and 25 per cent (Mosley, 2000, drawing on nationaland World Bank data). For women it is generally much lower than this (Saito, 1994).

718 P. Mosley


which technical change is able to give to poverty reduction, it is important that incentives

to local production not be blunted. Food aid runs the risk of doing this in a number of

countries, in those cases where it is supplied on a non-emergency basis.

Financial Services and Risk Management

A fundamental claim advanced earlier (and substantiated in Figure 6) is that modern cereal

seed technology, unlike most types of technical innovation, provides a free lunch:

increases yields and reduces risks at the same time. This enormously increases its

attractiveness to very poor households who simply cannot afford to take risks since the

consequences for them of the downside are so costly: family break-up, child labour,

depletion of physical and human capital assets, and in the extreme case malnutrition and

starvation. Even if it comes in the conventional form of loans, there is plenty of evidence

that the availability of finance to small farmers increases yields (Table 2 above; also

Mosley, forthcoming, Table 3); but given the entirely rational risk-aversion of very small

and vulnerable farmers, the spread of financial services to them is doubly welcome if it

comes in the form of services which protect against risk—i.e., savings and insurance. In

this context the recent World Development Report (World Bank, 2000, p. 143) argues for

financial product innovation on the grounds that ‘there are almost no insurance markets in

developing countries’. This is clearly poetic licence, but there is no doubt of the inability

of such markets, in Africa, to reach the poorest people; even in the relatively sophisticated

environment of rural Uganda, insurance is only available against fire and theft to better-off

people who are able to visit the town offices of commercial banks. Institutions able to pick

up small savings deposits from rural locations and to offer insurance contracts against the

insurable risks which most afflict poor people (drought, damage to assets, and most of all

ill-health) remain a rarity in Africa. Banks and NGOs operating in this field could learn a

great deal from the more extended experiments in savings and insurance now operating in

South Asia (e.g. SEWA, BRAC, and Grameen Kalyan); and in the process could sharply

increase smallholder yields, in the process reducing poverty at low cost. The experience of

Centenary Bank of Uganda is instructive in this regard. A commercial bank with no formal

poverty mandate or apparatus of eligibility testing, it has nonetheless managed to take

deposits from, and make loans to, very small low-income farmers in Mbale district with an

average (more than 30 days) overdue rate of 1.5 per cent. Not many of these farmers are

themselves below the poverty line, but many employees of these borrowers are, with the

consequence that an estimated per cent of a sample of 150 borrowers and borrowers’

dependants made an upward transition across the poverty line in 2000, at an estimated cost

of approximately $400 per household. An insurance scheme (Mosley, 2001) is now in

preparation. The significance of all this is that elsewhere, finance for smallholder

agriculture has been seen as a disaster area even by successful microfinance lenders

such as the BRI unit desas of Indonesia, leading to an aversion from the sector.22 The

experience of Centenary—and, on a smaller scale, of other microfinance lenders such as

K-REP Chogoria, the Cameroon Gatsby Trust, the South African Farmer Support

Programme and others—is that this aversion is misplaced and that it is possible to lend

22Jonathan Morduch (1999:) echoes the conventional wisdom in arguing that ‘microfinance has yet to make realinroads in areas focussed sharply on highly seasonal occupations like agricultural cultivation. Seasonality thusposes one of the largest challenges to the spread of microfinance in areas centred on rainfed agriculture, areas thatinclude some of the poorest regions of South Asia and Africa’.



successfully to smallholder agriculture in a manner that reduces poverty. Enlargement of

the existing poverty multiplier may depend on such schemes being successfully scaled up.

4.3 Labour Markets and Gender

Poverty in Africa is serious not only because rural productivity is low, but also because

those few activities where it is high (such as food production based on hybrid seeds)

generate such weak ripples, or multipliers. Of the components of the poverty multiplier,

the rural labour market, as in Asia, is generally the most important (Table 5 above). But

African labour markets, as lamented by Collier et al. (1994) and Udry (1996) are

commonly much weaker than in Asia even for a given level of activity; indeed, Udry’s

influential analysis of an archetypal African rural economy (at page 1013) assumes that no

labour hiring for cash takes place at all! Although many exceptions to this rule exist, as

documented for example in Table 5, a key priority for policy must be to stimulate the

formation of what are often ‘missing’ or highly localised markets for labour. Often this

must be done indirectly, through improvement of infrastructure and financial services, but

there are cases where it has been achieved more directly by investment in ‘missing’

technologies at the labour-intensive end of the production function (e.g. energy generation

through micro-hydro; sugar processing through evaporation pans), by special employment

programmes, or by social funds (White, 2002).

Of particular concern is that labour markets, like extension services, are biased against

women even though women do most of the work in African agriculture and are responsible

for a majority of the key decisions which determine African labour productivity. Our

research (Mosley, forthcoming, Ch. 4) suggests an elasticity of demand for male labour,

averaged across Kenya, Uganda and Malawi, of 0.33 and for female labour of only 0.24;

female participation rates varied radically across countries but were sensitive to (among

variables easily influenced by policy) the woman’s education level, the woman’s access to

credit, the quality of the infrastructure, social capital within the village and the wage rate

offered and, less open to policy influence, women’s perceptions about the community’s

attitude to them if they went out to work. Given the unequal distribution of poverty within

the household and the significant and increasing role23 that African women play in

agricultural decision-taking—in most regions more influential than that of Asian

women—the reorientation of agricultural policy towards the women farmers who

comprise its backbone is probably the largest single step which could be taken to make

technical change in African agriculture more poverty-focussed.

5 CONCLUSION—THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRO-POORAGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT

As time goes by, anti-poverty strategies are expected to carry a progressively greater

weight of responsibility—including, now, to bring peace and better health alongside the

standard material benefits which are expected to flow from the reduction of poverty. The

idea that all policy roads lead through poverty reduction has been one of the main forces

sustaining the OECD International Development Targets and persuading doubters such as

23The proportion of female-headed households increased from 18 to 36 per cent between 1980 and 2000,according to IFAD (2001).

720 P. Mosley


the United States (Financial Times, 24 March 2002) to affirm their commitment to these

targets and to announce new aid ‘windows’ as earnest of that commitment. But as is well

known, progress towards these targets has been patchy (e.g. World Bank, 2000, Box 2, p. 5),

and donors are therefore urgently in need of new instruments with which to put back on the

rails those regions which keep slipping off them—notoriously Africa.

It might seem quixotic, in the light of this review, to propose an extension of the African

green revolution as an addition to this arsenal, since so far, as we have shown, it has been a

big disappointment—patchy, transient, and very limited in its outward ripples. I would

like nonetheless to insist that no meaningful anti-poverty strategy can omit it from

consideration, and that this case needs to be argued, because most modern poverty

strategies and PRSPs focus on the consumption side of the market, virtually ignoring the

production which is needed to support every livelihood. Of these production activities,

agriculture becomes increasingly fundamental as one moves down towards the poorest of

the poor and the salience of food in the household budget increases. It may be increasingly

fashionable, witness the 2001 DSA conference, to ask ‘whether the African smallholder

can survive’, but fashion is completely out of touch with reality: should smallholder

farming in Africa become unviable, non-agricultural activities cannot in the short or

medium term take up the slack, and every sort of anti-poverty strategy, not least the

realisation of the International Development Targets, will be out the window. It has been

the purpose of this article to seek to reconnect anti-poverty efforts, in the poorest

continent, with a realistic strategy for increasing the productivity of the activity which

still supports a majority of people’s livelihoods.

The strategy proposed derives partly from a demonstration that modern cereal seed

varieties are pro-poor, and partly from an argument that specified policy reforms could

make it even more pro-poor. The latter argument has three prongs: intensification of

smallholder support services; diffusion of risk-reducing financial services, expansion of

labour markets with a bias towards women. Intellectually, we believe that the case is

strong, and it is very encouraging to see it also being made within Africa by independent

researchers (e.g. IFPRI, 2001). Much as we would like to feel that this article could tip the

balance in carrying the case through into policy, the deciding factor will in fact be

political—in particular the perception which ruling elites have of the costs of not forcing a

green revolution. The relevant illustration comes from India in 1965. Faced with a severe

foreign exchange crisis, the Indian government was persuaded—partly by the Rockefeller

Foundation, but principally by the fear that doing otherwise would mean food shortage and

loss of political control—to import 18,000 tons of Mexican hybrid wheat seed, and the

result was the take-off of the green revolution in South Asia. A similar sense of danger

within African governments would work wonders in forcing their own green revolutions,

with the poverty consequences that we have observed. Such a sense of danger was indeed

felt—transiently—by the government of a newly independent Zimbabwe in 1981 and by

the government of an about-to-become-democratic South Africa in 1988–89; and the

result in each case was the onset of a green revolution which proved impermanent. The key

to an effective poverty strategy, not only in the southern part of Africa, may be converting

the hesitant start described in this paper into a sustainable process; and the key to that, not

only in southern Africa, may be an aid policy which exposes and does not conceal the costs

and vulnerabilities associated with foodgrain imports. Aid donors, as we saw at the

beginning, have let their commitments to agriculture slip, and the achievement of their

larger objectives may depend on a focussing of those commitments on the productive

activities of the poorest, coupled with instilling in their governments an awareness that



failing to meet the needs of those poorest people could be not just undesirable in the

abstract, but actually dangerous for them.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper was first given as a presidential address to the Development Studies Associa-

tion conference on 11 September 2001. The paper derives from research conducted with

the help of a grant from the Gatsby Charitable Foundation and is expected to be published

in fuller form as Mosley (2003). Thanks are due to the Foundation for their support; to

Andrew McKay for research collaboration on the Gatsby project and in particular the

results presented in Table 4; and to David Hulme, John Toye, Stefan Dercon and seminar

audiences at Oxford (CSAE) and LSE (DESTIN) for their comments and ideas. None of

the above takes any responsibility for opinions and errors expressed here.

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