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The article discusses the role of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in affecting energy security. It mentions that oil plays an important role as a major commodity in demand for both oil exporting and oil importing countries. The OPEC was established to secure the economic interest of oil exporting countries through their oil policies. OPEC also coordinates its members' oil policies through managing the supply of crude oil.

For most of the twentieth century French school children were taught a quotation attributed to the Duke of Sully (1559–1641) to the effect that ‘plough and pasture are the lifeblood of France's economy’. This early ‘physiocratic’ affirmation of the supremacy of agriculture over other economic activities curiously survived into the late twentieth century despite the ever-dwindling importance of farming in modern, industrialised economies. Although endowed with some of the best soils in Western Europe, France failed to achieve self-sufficiency in major foodstuffs until the 1960s (by which time the diversification of tastes was making this objective pointless). Fortunately (?) the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy), implemented in 1962, came to its rescue by granting French agriculture a second lease of life, and promoting France to the position of ‘agricultural superpower’ in Europe and the second largest exporter in the world. Recently, however, EU budget constraints and the industrial methods developed in animal farming (as well as the damage done to the environment) have cast doubts on the sustainability and ultimate soundness of a policy of massive public support to agriculture ‘at any cost’. A ‘ruralist utopia’ Something curious happened between the middle of the nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth century: France, unlike many comparable European countries, maintained, even after the initiation of industrialisation, a relatively high and stable labour force in agriculture. In 1936 there were about as many people employed in farming as there had been in 1866. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our goal at the end of this enterprise is to propose bounded generalizations that are sensitive to variation and that avoid essentialized categories. Coffee was not an all-powerful master that demanded that its subjects follow a specific life-style and mindset. Our findings are often made in opposition to grand theories, such as dependency and modernization, and we are thus cautious about putting forward alternative models, especially at a time when comprehensive metanarratives are suspect. However, we also believe that we should not lapse into the nihilistic belief that every case is unique, every time different. We have to start with empirical work, based on realistic and historically sensitive categories. From these we can inductively create generalizations, which can allow us to attempt deductive reasoning. Despite our stress on variation and agency, we believe that useful conclusions can be drawn from all this, stimulating comparisons that look for patterns as well as for differences. Indeed, we hope that this volume might even help guide a minister of development in a contemporary coffee-producing country. He or she would consider consulting producers' associations, pickers' organizations, women's groups, ethnic clubs, processors, marketing boards, commercial intermediaries, internal transporters, exporters, and shippers, rather than dictate a “one-size-fits-all” policy from above. Such an enlightened minister would see that variation is determined not just by happenstance and contingency, and that local conditions and experiences affect the forces and consequences of production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neither Cameroon nor Tanganyika ever belonged to the most important coffee producers in Africa, let alone in the world. However, coffee was crucial to the economic, social, and cultural transformation of some African societies during the first half of the twentieth century. In this chapter, I compare the Kilimanjaro region of Northern Tanganyika and the highlands of West Cameroon, giving special consideration to two basic factors of production: land and labor. These two regions were centers of coffee production in colonial times, and kept this role after independence. The chapter aims to demonstrate how both internal factors and external political and economic interests led to specific land and labor patterns. The production of a crop such as coffee for the international market imposes certain common conditions on agricultural economies, notably, for the combination of land, labor, and capital. In much of colonial Africa, there was a complex shift from communal land ownership, albeit often with individual usufruct, to individual ownership. Agricultural commercialization during the colonial period stimulated individual claims to land, and land sales, in many African communities. The expansion of cash crops also had a strong influence on changing patterns of land use. Since coffee is a permanent crop, in many regions land was no longer used for two or three years before being abandoned, but was occupied on a permanent basis. Crop production often led to large-scale recruitment of nondomestic labor and provided new opportunities for accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The town of Bukoba has seen better days. Located on the shore of Lake Victoria in the northwestern corner of Tanzania, Bukoba has suffered from years of civil war in neighboring Uganda and Rwanda and from decades of neglect by the distant government in Dar es Salaam. Following German rule from 1889 to 1916 and a British mandate to 1961, this small town was exceptionally prosperous at independence, as were the Haya farmers in the surrounding countryside. Bukoba was the largest coffee-producing region in the country, and investments in trade and education seemed to auger well for the future. Fate has been unkind to Bukoba since 1961. Its coffee economy now supports a tedious status quo of just getting by, rather than a dream of sustained development. Farming is carried out on a small scale by many peasant families, and few have the resources to supply modest inputs that could make a difference to coffee output, such as pumps, fertilizers, and pesticides. This type of small-scale, undercapitalized, market-oriented agriculture is one of the principal legacies of colonialism in rural Africa. This chapter emphasizes the ability of Haya to make their voices heard and influence the way that coffee was integrated into their society. For all the tensions in the relationship between colonial state and peasants, there was an underlying consensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That cup of coffee you sip at your breakfast table, desk, or café comes from far away. It was grown in Brazil, Colombia, Vietnam, the Ivory Coast, or one of a hundred other coffee-producing lands on five continents. It is a palpable and long-standing manifestation of globalization. For 500 years coffee has been grown in tropical countries for consumption in temperate regions, linking peoples of different lands and continents by trade, investment, immigration, conquest, and cultural and religious diffusion. There is a world of history in your cup. An increasingly sophisticated study of world history is a means of understanding these processes. We have thus brought together scholars from nine countries, who cover coffee markets and societies over the last five centuries in fourteen countries on four continents and across the Indian and Pacific oceans, with a special emphasis on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We analyze a wide variety of issues, related to economic, political, and cultural development, to see how they have played out over the last centuries in different parts of the globe, under different political arrangements: the creation and function of commodity, labor, and financial markets; the role of race, ethnicity, gender, and class in the formation of coffee societies; the interaction between technology and ecology; and the impact of colonial powers, nationalist regimes, and the forces of the world economy in the forging of economic development and political democracy. [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]

States are unique among social institutions in that they seek to ensure that their rules predominate over the rules of other institutions such as the family, the community, the tribe, or the market. In fact, the capacity to exert authoritative control has long been a defining feature of states. Characteristically, modern states must make and enforce sets of rules related to property rights, contracts, civil and criminal justice, and the selection of those who make and implement the rules. Part of their purpose is to “reduce uncertainty by establishing a stable (but not necessarily efficient) structure to human interaction.” The most authoritative states are those in which the right to make and enforce rules is based on widespread acceptance of their legitimacy to do so. But the history of economic and political development in Latin America and Africa is a useful reminder that institutions of state dominance are not always authoritative. The 1980s and early 1990s were replete with conflict and uncertainty over whose rules would predominate and be accepted as legitimate. Informal markets, ethnic conflict, armed subversion, sectarian claims on personal loyalties, corruption, and other evidence of institutional instability recalled the notion of the soft state, initially used by Gunnar Myrdal to refer to states that lacked capacity to enforce obligations on citizens – states unable to govern. As many states failed in authoritativeness, rival sets of institutions often set the terms for economic and political interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1980s and 1990s witnessed economic and political crises of historic significance in Latin America and Africa. Throughout both regions, economies that were already fragile were almost destroyed by debt, inflation, low commodity prices, high interest rates, and devastating natural disasters. Political systems faced grave challenges to their right to govern societies that were themselves torn by division and unrest. Regime changes, civil wars, civic protest, and demands for human rights and accountable public officials characterized the political history of this era. The evidence is extensive and unambiguous: economic and political distress were hallmarks of an unsettled and unsettling era. Repeatedly, crisis exposed the weakness of existing state capacities to manage economic and political relationships. This chapter uses data from sixteen countries in Latin America and Africa to explore the scope, nature, and implications of economic and political crisis. It addresses four questions. First, what was the scope of the dual crises of economic and political development facing countries in these regions? Second, what factors explain the nature of the problems that confronted a wide range of governments? Third, what impact did economic and political collapse or near collapse have on various dimensions of state capacity? Finally, what consequences did crisis have for state–economy and state–society relationships? Subsequent chapters deal in greater detail with the same issues in Mexico and Kenya; this chapter indicates the extent to which these two countries shared in region-wide political and economic trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1980s and 1990s posed great challenges to governments in Latin America and Africa. Deep economic crisis and significantly heightened pressure for political reform severely taxed their capacity to manage economic and political tasks. In fact, the era was a critical moment in which existing state–economy and state–society relations were challenged and, at times, redefined. This book is about the significance of these challenges and redefinitions for the capacities – institutional, technical, administrative, and political – that states in Latin America and Africa require if they are to encourage economic development and provide effective governance for their societies. It explores the roles that political leaders and institutions played in a decade-long drama of crisis and change. There is little question that this period will be remembered as an era of crisis for countries in Latin America and Africa. An economic crisis, often rooted in development policies adopted in prior decades and greatly increased prices for oil in the 1970s, was precipitated in the early 1980s by a series of external shocks, principal among which were a sharp rise in real interest rates, a rapid decline in the availability of international credit, and a sharp fall in international commodity prices. As a consequence, external terms of trade became highly unfavorable for many developing countries, budget deficits escalated, and foreign debt burdens became unmanageable. International conditions as well as domestic policies explain these problems. The impact of such conditions on developing country economies was extensive and often extreme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]