In the late 1990s a review of aid-assisted livestock projects included an assessment of sustained impact on poorer producers (Ashley et al. 1998). The review looked back over 35 years and analysed documents from more than 800 livestock projects funded by major donors, including the Department foInternational Development (UK), the World Bank, the US Agency for International Development, the European Commission, DANIDA, theNetherlands Development Cooperation and the Swiss Development Cooperation.

The majority of these projects were based on a technical transfer paradigmin which constraints facing poor livestock keepers were to be addressed by the development anduptake of technologies, including new methods to control animal diseases, improve livestock breedsor raise production through a variety of other means. However, the lack of sustained impact on the poowas dramatic. In many cases, technologies were developed which livestock keepers either did not want or could not access due to weak delivery systems. In other cases, the benefits of new technologies were captured by wealthier producers.

Partly in response to these problems, a second broa category of livestock projects evolved which aimed to strengthen the capacity of organisations to develop and deliver novel technologies and services to the poor. These projects focused on government organisations (veterinary and extension services, research centres) and aimed to promote more clientfocused and decentralised approaches. A key project activity was training middle-level managers, researchers and field-level technicians. Again, the sustained benefit of these “organisational projects” was limited.

New skills did not change the way organisations behaved, as the overriding institutional frameworks rarely provided incentives for addressing the specific needs of the poor. Despite this rather gloomy picture a few projects did demonstrate substantial impact. These included new approaches to primary animal health care using privatised community-based animal health workers (CAHWs). Working in marginalised arid and semiarid areas of East Africa, local problem analysis wit communities led to the selection and training of CAHWs in areas where few veterinarians were willing to work. However, even these projects faced problems at a policy and institutional level – veterinary policies and legislation did not support CAHWs and were often vague or not implemented.

This article describes how workers at the Africa Union/InterAfrican Bureau for Animal Resources (AU/IBAR) addressed policy constraints toCAHWservices in theHorn and East Africa. The AU/IBAR team developed and applied a range of lobbying, advocacy, networking and learning methods within an overall strategy which recognised the overtly political nature of the policy process. Over time, the teamalso targeted global animal health standard setting bodies and began to apply their experience of policy process to a broader range of livestock policies.

{jathumbnail off}{jcomments off}Agricultural development is a sine qua non fo improving livelihoods in Africa’s predominantlyrural economies, yet agricultural productivity has hardly improved and African food production percapita continues to decline. This is not because of a lack of planning efforts, but rather because thesehave not been of the scale required to have an impact on such huge problems. Past efforts have also no been sufficiently holistic for advancing comple systems and have not been pursued with thenecessary long-term vision and willingness to take the risks that are inherent in implementinginnovations.

To break the poverty trap experienced by the majority of African smallholders andpastoralists, these issues must be addressed. Targets for African poverty reduction are not being achieved. Many individual programmes and institutions show good returns to investment in agricultural research and development, but the sum of their collective effort falls far short of making a significant impact at the national level on poverty reduction and food security.2 Examples of innovations that have had significant impact Significant impact comes from significanintellectual and financial input. The two billion people – 30 per cent of the world’s total – that depend on the Haber–Bosch process of synthesisings (million Kshs )

{jathumbnail off}{jcomments off}This year’s UNMillennium Report highlights the lack of progress in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in sub-Saharan Africa. The Commission for Africa report (2005) similarly highlights themajor challenges of poverty reduction on the continent.What role should agriculture have in this challenge? Most of Africa’s poor are rural, and most rely largely on agriculture for their livelihoods. Inevitably, “getting agriculture moving” must be part of the solution to the seemingly intractable problem of African poverty.

The standard storyline about African agriculture is not positive. In most countries, the sector is slow growing or stagnant, held back by negligible yield growth, poor infrastructure, degrading environmental resources, erratic weather, HIV/AIDS and civil conflict. But sweeping, generalised analyses often hide important stories of success. As Toulmin and Guèye (in this IDS Bulletin) highlight for West Africa, there have been some notable achievements in the past decade. This is replicated elsewhere, as Wiggins observes (also in this IDS Bulletin), where supplyled successes – including in hybrid maize, horticulture, dairy, cassava (see also Haggblade and Gabre-Madhin 2004) – have combined with new sources of demand, due to improvements in infrastructure, changing market conditions or the opening up of niche opportunities. Are these successes exceptional and limited to particular settings and times, or are they replicable across wider areas, benefiting larger numbers of people?

This IDS Bulletin draws together contributions from a diverse range of researchers and development practitioners working in Africa, with the common goal of exploring why agriculture is contributing to poverty reduction and livelihood improvement in some places, but not in many. Identifying ways forward implies moving away from failed past prescriptions, identifying and building on current successes and encouraging new and innovative thinking about future pathways and opportunities. This debate comes at a critical time. As the African Union’s Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Economy notes in the foreword to this IDS Bulletin, there is renewed interest in agriculture in Africa and a real commitment to revitalise the sector.

This comes fromnumerous sources – whether frominternational initiatives such as the UNMillenniumProject’s Task Force onHunger (2005) or theCommission for Africa report (2005); from within Africa, such as the African Union and NEPAD’s (New Partnership for Africa’s Development) Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme(CAADP) (NEPAD 2003), from national governments themselves or from the international donor community (USAID 2004; DFID 2003; World Bank 2002). But how to translate these words into reality? How to avoid the recycling and repackaging of old – and often failed – ideas? How to generate new thinking, rooted in African contexts and ground realities, whichmakes a difference? The aim of this IDS Bulletin is to contribute to this journey.

The central puzzle is: Why is African agriculture (largely) stagnating? This question is not new. Many have commented on the failures of an African “green revolution”, and many explanations have been suggested. The following sections outline three responses: “technical fixes”, “market and institutional fixes” and “policy fixes”. Each approach reflects a different way of looking at the problem, and each implies different ways forward. The IDS Bulletin draws on insights from across sub-Saharan Africa and is organised as follows. Three scenesetting articles follow this introductory piece. Then there are clusters of articles focusing on “resources and technologies”, “markets and institutions” and“policies and policy processes”.

{jathumbnail off}{jcomments off}Neoliberal policies have in recent years focused on introducing institutional reform to facilitate and regulate the operation of free markets. It is still assumed that the freemarket is the best mechanism to achieve efficient and equitable growth, alongsidetechnical prescriptions. A growing body of research on the political economy of agribusiness and the ways in which agribusiness and geopolitical interestscapture world commodity markets is largely ignored within mainstream agricultural development literature on Africa. After 20 years of neoliberal reform in Africa, the same old formulas are dogmatically asserted without critical reflection.

Bates (1981) dealt a telling indictment of the elite basis of state policies in Africa. But his analysis largely focused on abstract models ofmarkets and failed to examine the interventions of the state in agricultural production, which were often based on linkages with agribusiness and aspiring private sector capitalists. The interventions of the state in agriculture served not only to promote patronage but also the development of capitalist agriculture and agribusiness.

Bates failed to analyse the interests of agribusiness in expanding into developing country markets. This is an important factor, since the open market policies he advocated play into the interests of agribusiness. This article examines how agricultural markets have been shaped by power relations, often at the expense of the rural poor, and how the organisation of frontiers, transport and input supplies affect export crop, food and agribusiness production. The frontier and export crop In looking at state interventions that control producer prices to the detriment of farmers, one ofthe sectors that Bates focused on was cocoa production in Ghana.

Bates argues that the state sought to appropriate an increasing proportion of the producer price to use in expanding its political patronage. As a result farmers stopped producing cocoa and turned to food production. During the 1980s Côte d’Ivoire was regarded as the economic miracle of Africa, whose open door policies favoured growth. By the 1990s the Ivorian economy entered crisis as world cocoa prices collapsed, and there were structural similarities between this and the earlier crisis in Ghana.

The existence of excellent research on the interaction between production, market prices, and crisis in Côte d’Ivoire enables us to re-evaluate the earlier crisis in Ghana. Cocoa production throughout the world is patterned on cycles of boom, collapse and movement of cocoa to new frontier areas ofremaining forest land. Cocoa is subject to a ‘forest rent’ (Ruf 1997). New areas of production achieve windfalls from soil conditions, moisture, and lack of weeds and pests, which are reflected in low production costs. As cocoa plantations become old they become less productive, susceptible to pests, and weed populations build up. The cost of labour and inputs increase and profits decline. The cost of rehabilitating cocoa in old producing zones is high.

Cocoa producers respond by migrating to new areas of forest where production costs are lower.Labour migrates to these new areas since labouring is less arduous and gains better returns. The decline of production in old areas can result in higher world prices.New frontier areas come into production

{jathumbnail off}Local classification of soil types,

Gororo, southern Chivi Views on inorganic fertilizers and manures from Chivi communal Area Wetlands and gardening Profdes of case study farmers according to four soil-fertilitychange scenarios experimenting farmers in Chivi communal area Rural livelihoods: identifying avenues for intervention forsoil-fertility management Identifying options for policy and practice: examples from the field sites.

The reasons for the very significant gap between potential and realized food production in sub-Saharan Africa are multiple and complex. The decline in fertility observed for many areas of soil has been described as the single most important factor. Although this is a challengeable statement it undoubtedly refers to an ever-present reality for the majority of farmers in the continent – that optimizing the nutrient balance on their farms is one of the most difficult of the many agricultural management challenges they face.

A central feature of this hook is the documentation of the great variety of ways in which farmers have dealt with this problem. More importantly it also gives excellent insight into the ways in which the soil fertility issue interacts with a multiplicity of other factors which impact on farm production – biological, economic, social and political. Scientists, with their strong disciplinary adherences, apply the power of reductive research to these issues and often provide solutions which are valid within their own limits, hut which are difficult to apply because of the lack of attention to these interactive factors.

The work reported in this book helps to resolve this disjunction between formal scientific method and the realities of farm management. Scientificmethods of varying degrees of formality are used to document and analyse the soil fertility ‘prohlem’, the factors which influence it and farmers’ coping strategies. The replication of this across different countries, environments and communities permits the drawing of commonalities as well as distinctions. The major benefit that may be gained from this is to inform scientists -not just with data hut with insights into the realities of the totality of the farming enterprise. The challenge is then to identify those ‘entry points’ where formal scientific knowledge can he employed to enhance the system as a whole.

A strong case can indeed be made that soil fertility management is a very significant entry point because of the many interactions it has with othercomponents and because of the long-term nature of the effects that result from changes in soil nutrient status. This book is thus to be recommended not just for the information and insights it provides with respect to the specific issue of soil fertility management, but also because of the major questions it provokes about the application of scientific research to the challenges of sustainable agriculture under the prevailing conditions in African countries.

{jathumbnail off}{jcomments off}The poverty-reduction strategy adopted by Ethiopia seeks to achieve growth through the commercialisation of smallholder agriculture. The Plan for Accelerated and Sustainable Development to End Poverty (PASDEP), Ethiopia.s strategic framework for 2005/06 – 2009/10, relies on a massive push to accelerate growth. This is to be achieved by efforts in two directions: commercialisation of agriculture, based on supporting the intensification of marketable farm products (both for domestic and export markets, and by both small and large farmers); and promoting much more rapid non-farm private sector growth (MoFED, 2005).

This study aims to contribute to this plan by identifying factors that can deepen and expand the scope of market participation of smallholders. Commercialisation of agriculture is also a core research theme of the Future Agricultures Consortium.

Future Agricultures. thematic work on agricultural commercialisation has observed that, in various countries, different modes of commercialisation co-exist and interact with each other (Leavy and Poulton 2007:17): hence the plural term, commercialisations. In Ethiopia, we suggest that the following existing categories of farmer could benefit from enhanced commercialisation (or “market-oriented agricultural growth”). These four categories represent four potentially complementary “pathways” for commercialisation policy.

1. Smallholder family farms

• (Type A) Farmers in remote, drought-prone or low-potential areas, generally regarded as “subsistence-oriented” but in fact interacting with markets both as buyers and as sellers. The policy challenge posed by these farmers is to improve their terms of engagement with markets, as well as raising productivity and diversifying livelihoods.
• (Type B) Small farmers who are already market-oriented, producing crops partly or
• wholly for sale alongside crops for their own consumption.
• Such farmers tend to be in locations with favourable growing and marketing conditions, and tend to focus on specific high-value commodities.

2. Small investor-farmers

• Individuals or small groups of partners, often educated and urban-based; sometimes agricultural professionals with a background in government or development agencies or former state farms; often investing in farming as a secondary activity. These farmers are referred to in World Bank terminology as “emerging commercial
• farmers”, suggesting an expected linear trajectory towards larger-scale agri-business. However, we suggest that they are in fact a separate category. In Ethiopia they have started to re-emerge only in the last few years, when access to land for such investments has been made possible.

3. Large-scale “agri–business”

• These are generally capital-intensive enterprises (though they also generate employment), and may be either private or state-owned. Examples are the large.