africa

Yale Center for the Study of Globalization
an opportunity for the continent’s future development as Acquah submits, even
suggesting – perhaps too optimistically – that revenues from natural resources
properly managed could reach 400 billion US dollars a year, an amount which is
eight times Africa’s development aid receipts. Better governance and management
of those resources, not an impossible task, can be the lever toward new economic
activities—not only in the processing and refining of those commodities but also in
downstream industries, thus rendering higher GDP growth and enhanced generation
of better quality jobs, along with the enlarged fiscal revenues that are so greatly
needed to finance the necessary physical and human infrastructure.
Adam’s contribution, on Tanzania’s opportunities and challenges stemming from
its potential natural gas reserves, proves very effectively that a judicious conjunction
of insights from the development and optimal exploitation of natural resources
literature can be used to provide a set of concrete principles of unquestionable
value for policy makers.
1.4 Agriculture
Africa does not only have hydrocarbons and minerals as natural resources. As
Elhiraika and his co-author stress, the continent is also home to 60 percent of the
world’s uncultivated arable land. This fact, together with the circumstance that agricultural
productivity is still lagging in most African countries, strongly suggests that
in this sector another huge reserve for development still resides. A number of our
authors emphasize the role of agriculture as one of the renewed sources of growth
that will be needed if Africa is to sustain its good overall performance of the last 15
years. As several authors explain in their respective chapters, agriculture is crucial
considering that a large proportion of the population (around half a billion Africans)
and around 70 percent of the poor are still rural. Leaving agriculture for other economic
activities and urbanization alone will not solve the still growing problem of
poverty. This huge challenge must also be tackled within the agricultural sector itself.
Given that Africa’s agricultural value added per worker still lags behind that in other
regions of the world, McArthur rightly observes that most African countries will need
to raise agricultural productivity significantly if they are to be able to achieve widely
distributed economic gains. He explains that in order to achieve the desired rise in
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