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Sources of Growth in East African Agriculture |
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A dynamic agricultural sector is critical for alleviating Sub-Saharan
Africa's current economic crisis, and for laying the foundations of
sustained future growth. In recent years, however, agriculture has
performed poorly in many African countries. Efforts to assist its
recovery, often through structural adjustment lending, have suffered
from inadequate information about country- and region-specific factors,
and from an emphasis on macroeconomic policies without complementary
interventions at the sector level. The article describes the patterns
of agriculturalg rowth in Kenya, Malawi, and Tanzania, and examines
price and nonprice aspects of three sets of factors: initial endowments
and subsequent exogenous developments, general economic influences, and
sectoral issues and policies. It suggests that government action at the
sectoral and subsectoral levels in such critical areas as land policy,
smallholders' access to inputs, and agricultural research needs to be
combined with macroeconomic reforms to achieve sustained and broadbased
agricultural growth.
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