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has occurred in the Near East while in the Far East the breakthrough has
even been dramatic (Griffin 1979: 8). Unhappily, there is no evidence that
anything_ofthekindhashappened inAfrica (Ibidem: 7).
The past record of African agriculture has been far from brilliant.
In the period 1934-1972, i.e. from before World War II untiljust before the
oil crisis, per capita growth of agricultural production was as low as 0.1
percent which means that production just kept pace with population
growth. 2 Since then food production in most of sub-Saharan Africa has
declined! TheFAO has estimated thatforthe continent as a whole the food
self- sufficiency index dropped from 100 in 1970 to not more than 88 in
1979. 3 It is in the light ofthis that the US Department of Agriculture expects
the import-gap for sub-Saharan Africa to be as large as 11.5 million metric
tons (cereal equivalents) by the year 1999, i.e. a deficit 10 times larger than
that for 1981.
Peasant Farming in Africa:
The Decline of Production and Productivity
The thrust of agricultural development policies is towards a drastic increase
of labour productivity. It is well known that yields per unit of land are
generally higher on small than on large farms while, conversely, small
farmers tend to have much lower labour productivity. In vi.::w of the
dominant role of small agricultural producers in Third World countries -
e.g. two-thirds of all who till the land in India (the rural landless are excluded
from the calculation) hold less than five acres (Griffin 1979: Table 2.1) and
55 percent of all farm holdings in Ghana are smaller than four acres (Report
on Census of Agriculture 1972: 43, Table VII.lO) - the productivity of
agricultural labour is quite low on average. In terms of index numbers which
express net production by male labour employed in agriculture in 'direct'
calories,4agricultural productivity for France stood at 100 compared to as
much as 330 for the United States and as little as 5.5 for the entire
underdeveloped world, excluding China (1968/72) (Bairoch 1975: Table 13).
Startling as these figures may be, the picture they present is still too
flattering in two ways. In the first place, the global averages hide the fact
that in most of Latin America - even excluding Argentina - the level of
agricultural productivity is much higher (9.8) than in Asia (4.3) and in
Africa (4.5).sThanks to the refined statistical work of Bairoch we are able
to assess the situation in terms of 'thresholds', one of which indicates that
2