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agricultural productivity has reached the level where it can ensure the
physiological reproduction of the population (at 2100 calories per head per
day). Bairoch estimates this 'physiological' threshold to be at 3 .8. Another
'threshold' indicates that productivity guarantees a population freedom
from the risk of famine. This 'freedom from famine risk' threshold is
estimated at 4.9 (Ibidem: 26-29). In the light of this we can only conclude
that both Asia and Africa, while able to offer sufficient life chances in
physiological terms, cannot in any definite way safeguard their populations
from the risk of famine. This differs, of course, from one country to
another: Kenya, at 5.3, is well beyond the famine risk while Ghana, at 3.9,
is only just above the physiological threshold (Ibidem: Table 8).
In the second place, the secular trend of agricultural productivity
is unfavourable. Although the underdeveloped world (excluding China)
experienced an increase over the period 1946/50-1953/57, it has since
suffered a slight decline. 6 For Africa, however, the picture is far more
unfavourable: since the years 1946/50 agricultural productivity - which
was not high at the outset (7.3) - declined by 37 percent, or more than onethird
(4.7) (Ibidem: Table 10).
While, therefore, agricultural productivity in many African countries
is so low that it does not offer any safeguard against famine, the
continent's agriculture is experiencing a decline which no-one so far has
been able to stop.
This leads us to an initial phrasing of the problem to whose solution
we hope to contribute, i.e. what is there in peasant farming as a form
of production, in its inner workings or 'logic' as well as in its national and
international relations to other branches of economic activity, which can
help us to explain its long-term stagnation and, as regards Africa, its more
recent decline as well as its apparent capacity to resist persistent efforts
towards its development?
It is very likely that some readers will frown at our use of the term
'peasant' in referring to the small-scale farmer of the Third World. 7
Although we might argue that the word 'peasant' is not infrequently used
as a simple synonym for 'small-scale farmer' and that both terms equally
group those primary producers together who, mainly by means of family
labour, cultivate a limited land area at a relatively low level of technology,
8 others will counter this argument with the theoretical overtones
that 'peasant' as a concept carries with it. We contend - and we shall take
that up in more detail in Chapter III that the problem of agricultural
stagnation in the underdeveloped world can only be solved in practice if
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