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| Title: | Coping with confusion: African farmers' responses to economic instability in the 1970s and 1980s |
| Author: | Berry, Sara |
| Year: | 1989 |
| Issue: | 141 |
| Pages: | 24 |
| Language: | English |
| Series: | Working papers |
| City of publisher: | Boston, MA |
| Publisher: | African Studies Center, Boston University |
| Geographic term: | Subsaharan Africa |
| Subjects: | farmers agricultural crisis |
| Abstract: | In this paper, the author looks at the ways in which external shocks, together with shifts in government policies, have affected the conditions under which most Africans live and work. She describes some of the strategies which African farmers have used to cope with instability (reliance on off-farm income, changes in cropping patterns and methods of cultivation, investment in stocks and social networks), and explores their implications for understanding recent trends in economic performance, especially in agriculture. She examines the recent history of agrarian crisis in sub-Saharan Africa in terms of the longer history of agrarian change since the beginning of colonial rule. She argues that people's strategies for generating a livelihood and managing assets reflect the conditions under which they gain access to the means of production. Access to the means of production in rural areas of Africa has been subject to instability and struggle since colonial times. Accordingly, recent patterns of production and investment are best understood as outcomes of a conjuncture between long-term patterns of access to productive resources and the increasing volatility of rural economic conditions since the 1970s. |