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The most important item on the agenda of development is to transform the food sector, create agricultural surpluses to feed the urban population and thereby create the domestic basis for industry and modern services. If we can make this domestic change, we shall automatically have a new international economic order. West Africa's international significance There are three criteria by which the big powers evaluate their interest in Third World regions such as West Africa: in descending order of significance, (1) global strategy, (2) economic resources, and (3) humanitarian concern. West Africa is clearly a region of low strategic significance. It is far removed from the Middle East and southern Africa, the nearest centers of global conflict. But the sixteen West African nations play a part in both through their membership in the Organization of African Unity and other international organizations. And Nigeria is a state with the potential to play a dominant role in the affairs of the continent as a whole. Nigeria is one of the few OPEC countries with a large population; it is a major oil supplier of the United States and an important market for both the United States and Britain. France has an obvious interest in maintaining close ties with her ex-colonies in West Africa, as part of a long-term plan of informal expansion in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our facts do more than illumine our morality and point out our ideal; for they help us to analyze economic facts of a more general nature, and our analysis might suggest the way to better administrative procedures for our societies. Labor mobility and the rural exodus The impact of modern developments on West Africa's rural societies is manifested in a number of ways, none of them easy to measure. Those who consider the commercialization of agriculture to be an enormous source of various pathologies would emphasize the impoverishment, class contradictions, and social disorganization that they imagine to be characteristic of rural life today. These judgments imply a comparison with earlier times that is even harder to make concretely. Not everyone would express his or her opinion as decisively as Polly Hill (1977:172): “This miserably inefficient, competitive, ill-equipped rural economy, where most men work far less hard than they would wish, shuffles along much as it did forty years ago – only relieved by the migration of some married men and their dependents.” But in this chapter I will pursue such themes with some degree of analytical interpretation and rather less documentation. Probably no topic captures the vicissitudes of recent changes in the countryside more completely than the massive shifts in population that have accompanied urbanization since World War II. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the domination of a patrimonial regime only certain kinds of capitalism are able to develop: capitalist trading; capitalist tax farming, lease and sale of offices; capitalist provision of supplies for the state and the financing of wars; under certain circumstances, capitalist plantations and other colonial enterprises. The revenue crisis in West Africa The development of agriculture in West Africa is illuminated greatly if we consider the principal local actors to be the rulers of preindustrial states. The economies of these states are backward, rural, undercapitalized, and decentralized. The problem faced by all modern regimes – precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial – has been how to extract from a largely agricultural population a reliable income sufficient to support the regime's expenditure needs. In this matter the successor states are somewhat at a disadvantage, because their standing in the world depends on levels and kinds of spending that were unthinkable twenty years ago, and they are not able to take some of the shortcuts in revenue collection that were available to their predecessors. Much has been made of outside pressure emanating from the centers of world capitalism; but I would like to consider here the internal pressures and options that have pushed all the successor states to base their strategies for independent government on control of agriculture in one form or another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of the future will be to deal with the native capitalists when they arise, as they will desire to oust the State from control of industry. This is the crux of the matter and it awaits determination. If the problem of the state can be treated as a separate topic for analysis, it is rather more difficult to isolate the role of the market and capitalism in West Africa's agricultural development, because these issues pervade this whole book. So the present chapter is short and even less descriptive than most of the others. It addresses four issues: the central mechanism that has led to the explosion of commercial agriculture in the modern period; the organization of marketing and transport, which together have produced a commercial revolution in modern times; money, that is, the forms of wealth and capital accumulation; and the question whether proletarianization of rural labor has laid the grounds for an agrarian revolution along classical capitalist lines. Why did West Africans produce for the world market? I have already indicated that the market was a significant feature of West African economies before the modern period. It was restricted in its development, however, by the low density of population, high transport costs, the self-sufficiency of local agriculture, the high import content of effective demand, and the low degree of specialization in the division of labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The population of a country in which commodity economy is poorly developed (or not developed at all) is almost exclusively agricultural. This, however, must not be understood as meaning that the population is engaged solely in agriculture: it only means that the population, while engaged in agriculture, itself processes the products of agriculture, and that exchange and the division of labor are almost non-existent. The traditional organization of farming Any discussion of modem developments in West African agriculture should begin and end with the rural division of labor that constitutes the social context of productive strategies. This chapter begins with a brief recapitulation of traditional economic structure in areas marked either by a complex structure of commodity production or by a simple division of labor. After a detailed examination of forest and savannah agriculture in the modern period and a more cursory look at the use of livestock, the chapter concludes with an assessment of the effects of these developments on the rural division of labor as a whole. As we have seen, traditional agriculture was carried out within the framework of a wider division of labor, which was developed to a high degree in some places, notably in the savannah civilizations around the Niger and Senegal rivers. The division of labor was less developed in the intermediate belt and in the forest away from the coast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small landed property presupposes that the overwhelming majority of the population is rural, and that not social, but isolated labor predominates; and that, therefore, under such conditions wealth and development of reproduction, both of its material and spiritual prerequisites, are out of the question and therefore also the prerequisites for rational cultivation. The regional setting West Africa is the nearest tropical region to Europe, from which it is separated by the Arabic civilizations of North Africa and the Middle East. Much of its people's history depends on this fact; but for all that, the origin of the tripartite relationship between the regions bordering on the northeast Atlantic and Mediterranean seas remains shrouded in mystery. For modern Europeans, the history of West Africa goes back only five hundred years to the time when the Portuguese began to explore an African route to the east round the flanks of Islam. For Arabs it began in the eleventh century, with the temporary expansion of Almoravid conquerors beyond the Maghreb down the coast toward the Senegal River. They did not stay long: Those who have attempted to conquer West Africa never have. The Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans left fragmented records of their encounters with the black peoples of Africa. But the West Africans themselves never developed an indigenous literate tradition, although the body of medieval African documents in Arabic is substantial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

… the brave army of heretics … who, following their intuitions, have preferred to see the truth obscurely and imperfectly rather than to maintain error, reached indeed with clearness and consistency and by easy logic but on hypotheses inappropriate to the facts. Scope and history of the work The topic of this book is the rise of commercial farming in West Africa. Specifically, I ask what the various forms of agricultural commodity production have been and how the social life and economic structure of the region's communities have been affected by these developments. Such questions are analogous to asking, “What has been the effect of the Industrial Revolution on Western Europe?” except that much less is known about West Africa, many of the forces shaping its history originate from elsewhere, and there is far more variation in indigenous culture there. What can one say about sixteen countries, four colonial traditions, and hundreds of ethnic groups? To attempt a summary would appear to be an act of gross hubris. Yet the unity of West Africa's experience of the modern world is real enough, and it is probable that, unless a synthesis of its fragmented polities is achieved fairly soon, no internal solution to the region's massive development problems will be forthcoming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]