Samir Amin: Origins of Africa's Agricultural Failure

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

*****   The origins of Africa's agricultural failure

Explanations for Africa's agricultural failure tend to be partial and
contradictory.2 The remote past - pre-colonial Africa - is partly to
blame. If there is one 'special characteristic' - apart from huge
variety - of the modes of rural organization in the greater part of
Africa, it is perhaps that the still scarcely begun communal or
tribute-paying forms implied extensive occupation of the soil. This
allowed for much greater food self-sufficiency than is commonly
imagined, thanks to relatively high productivity of labour (as a
complement to extremely low return to the acre). Higher production
per head entails moving to intensive modes requiring a much greater
overall quantity of labour in the year. This increase of production
per head is accompanied by a reduced productivity of labour (of
physical output per working 'day') but also by an improved return per
acre. This move to intensive agriculture, as a precondition to any
development worth the name, is the challenge that the African peoples
must take up.3

But the challenge has not yet been taken up. Colonization did not
only fail to do so: it was not even its aim. Colonialism found it
easier to take an immediate super-profit without cost (without
investment) by forcing the African peasants into unpaid - or poorly
paid - surplus labour through forms of indirect control. Slightly
higher output per head at the cost of a greater labour contribution,
without equipment or modern inputs (but to the destruction of
Africa's land capital), combined with a worsening of peasant living
standards, was enough to provide an appreciable margin for capital
dominating the global system. Colonization thus continued the ancient
tradition of the slave trade: exploitation by pillage that made no
provision for reproduction of the labour force over the long term or
of the natural conditions for production.

Independence brought no change to this mode of integration in the
world capitalist system. Change has come in response to the demands
of the new phase in the worldwide expansion of capital (the European
construct and United States hegemony) and not in response to the
problem of the African peasant. Moreover the prosperity of the 1960s
in the West has brought a new enthusiasm in Africa for the
'extroverted system'. And if René Dumont, always sensitive to the
peasant question, has lucidly and courageously denounced the 'false
start in Africa'.4 the World Bank, which is nowadays concerned about
the peasants' fate (while the IMF forces the most wretched to pay the
price of the failure) gave its enthusiastic support to the policies
that were to lead, ten years later, to disaster.

The crisis of the 1970s was the result of a conjunction between the
super-exploitation of land, men and women, reaching a level difficult
to relieve and the crisis striking the capitalist system as a whole.
In the face of this crisis the proposals raining down on Africa at an
increasing rate are no more than a manifestation of a 'quest for
palliatives'.

If it is no more than a matter of palliatives, then the media's talk
'in favour of agriculture' is shown as a contrast to a supposed
'preference for industrialization' that was at the origin of the
failure. But any meaningful quest for greater output per cultivator
is precisely to allow increased urbanization; and urbanization
without industrialization can only be parasitic and disastrous. In
turn, industry (but not unselectively) is necessary to permit greater
output from agriculture for which it must supply equipment and to
which it must offer a growing market. Here lies the option for an
autocentric popular and national strategy. If this option is rejected
in favour of a systematic integration in worldwide expansion, talk of
'priority for agriculture' becomes hollow and essentially demagogic.
The contradictions in the other 'proposals' are manifest: export
industry supposes low salaries and consequently low prices for food
crops, at the same time as it urges price rises as an incentive to
the peasants to produce more.

The populist garb some have given the proposals do not change their
meaning despite talk of basic needs and the strategy of 'petty family
production'. Meanwhile, such rhetoric has never prevented the Western
laid' bodies from showing a preference, in fact, to support for
agro-business and kulaks - in the name of efficiency. That these
policies continue to be advanced is evidence at bottom of the scant
seriousness with which Africa is treated. For Africa, in the
imperialist view of the world, is above all a source of mineral
resources for the West; neither its industrialization nor its
agricultural development are genuinely considered....

Analysing the exploitation of peasants

If Africa as a whole has not even begun its agricultural revolution,
this is essentially because the entire system in which it is
integrated is based on super-exploitation of the African peasants'
labour, and this is beneficial both to the system of dominant
capitalism and to the local classes who act as its relay. The system
of super-exploitation of the countryside, established by colonialism,
has not been challenged by the neo-colonial system that faithfully
carries on the tradition.

We are inadequately equipped to provide a theoretical analysis of
this super-exploitation because the great majority of African
peasants arc petty producers and consequently there are no obvious
direct exploiters, such as the great landowners are or have been
elsewhere. Conventional economic theory, almost on principle ignores
the phenomenon of labour exploitation. By virtue of its emphasis on
market mechanisms it remains a prisoner of the prejudice it feeds on,
that of 'pure and perfect competition'. At most it allows itself to
note in passing the gap between this model and the reality of
capitalist production. It is particularly the case of Third World
peasant production, which far from being independent, is subject to
this exploitation by capital.

There are varying forms of integration of this peasantry in the world
capitalist system: typified in very broad terms, by the integration
of petty peasant production in the world commodity market. The
essential here is not as it might at first seem: monopoly of colonial
houses, mediated through state bodies in some circumstances, and such
monopoly allowing super-profits from circulation, but at a more
profound level, namely direct interference by capital in the
organization of production. Obviously such interference will not be
perceived if the field of economics is separated from politics, for
it operates precisely through political, administrative and technical
incorporation of the petty peasantry. It is through such
incorporation that the peasants are obliged to specialize in certain
crops, to buy the inputs these need and finally to rely on the income
of their apparent sale. The peasant's formal ownership of the land
and the means of production is maintained but emptied of its genuine
content: the peasants lost control over economic decision-making and
organization of the production process and is no longer genuinely a
'free petty producer'. Thus, behind the apparent sale of the output
is concealed a sale of his labour power. Hence the peasant is
integrated in capitalist production relations invisible on the scale
of the peasant production unit, but perfectly visible at the level of
the global system in which he is integrated. It is just as difficult
to understand the failure to see the system of exploitation, of which
Marx in Capital provided a masterly and recognized example, in the
system of 'putting out' work.

Clearly, forms of exploitation of the peasant economy have themselves
evolved in various ways. Sometimes integration in capitalist exchange
has provoked appreciable differences in appropriation of the soil and
the instruments of production. In such a case, the rich peasants'
('kulak') direct exploitation of agricultural labourers or of
share-croppers, is superimposed by exploitation of the collective
commodity production by monopoly capital. In other cases,
administrative, colonial or neo-colonial incorporation is associated
with primary native social control that for want of a better term may
be described as parastatal, semi-feudal. Obviously the class that
battens on this 'incorporation' does not directly appropriate the
soil or the means of production, which is left in the peasants'
hands, but it still levies its tithe - the output of the peasant's
surplus labour - in one way or another. Here, too, the exploitation
of the peasant in these apparently pre-capitalist systems apparent
only (as they are the product of capitalist integration) - must not
obscure the fact that the systems are integrated in global capitalist
exploitation.

Obviously there are additional forms of superimposing relations of
capitalist exploitation on pre-capitalist relations, whether
themselves based on super-exploitation or not, just as there is an
extremely varied range of forms of articulation between
pre-capitalist and capitalist relations. In the case of Sub-Saharan
Africa, we have noted three classifications: the 'trading economy',
the 'reserve economy' and the 'concessionary companies economy'. All
these forms of exploitation must be studied concretely; no abstract
theory deduced a priori from some general principles can take the
place of concrete analyses.

In analysing these forms of extraction of surplus it would be helpful
to raise in general terms the issue of the law of value, which in the
end implicitly governs the validity of the thesis. To make it
possible to discuss exploitation the comparison of the values and
costs of the labour power of the peasant in question and of the
labourer - whose labour is embodied in the goods sold to that peasant
- must have some meaning, as obviously the goods exchanged have
values and costs that can meaningfully be compared. That is to say
that the thesis assumes a worldwide value category of commodities and
a worldwide value category of labour power. Even if the first of
these theses has won general acceptance, the second has not. The
sixth chapter of Capital [first published in 1933] however, showed
that Marx already had some sense of the problem. Marx suggests in
effect how difficult it is to grasp the value at the level of the
basic unit of production. He raises consideration of the concept of
'collective labourer' and suggests that this tends to include all the
workers in an increasingly broader area, comprising various
production units. The contents of this chapter, remarkably in advance
of its time and not known to Bukharin, were, however, implicitly
taken on board by the latter in his view of a capitalist development
that taken to its logical conclusion would lead to a 'sole ownership'
of the means of production: by the state. The value category would
then apparently have vanished; although it would still be there...
Bukharin perhaps had partly in mind a possible evolution of the USSR.
But above all he had in mind the profound tendency of capitalism
whereby without reaching the stage of 'sole ownership' we have by now
reached the stage where the dominance of capitalism spreads well
beyond the production units that form its base. It is on such
theoretical foundations that we have shaped our thesis that labour
power tends to have a unique value on a world scale although it
retains differential costs, above or below this value. The precise
measure of this tendency to a differentiation of the costs of labour
power can be gauged, albeit crudely, by 'double factorial terms of
trade', or the relationship between gross terms of trade and the
index of comparative productivities of labour.

An analysis of exploitation in these circumstances calls for a
complementary analysis of the overall political economy of the
colonial and neo-colonial system. In fact the increasing exploitation
of peasant labour is the main source of the typical distortions of
peripheral capitalist development. To go further in this field it is
necessary to make a concrete case by case examination of how income
distribution and the resulting demand have shaped industrial
patterns. It is then necessary to make a concrete examination of how
the increasing exploitation integrates the societies of peripheral
capitalism in the international division of labour in such a way as
to reproduce and intensify the increasing exploitation of labour.
Obviously these patterns of development and the increasing
contradictions they have provoked are at the origin of the crisis in
the imperialist system and of the responses to it by the national
liberation movement. The character of the compromises that have
invested the independence of Third World states and hence the
character of the reforms on which they embarked (such as replacement
of the former colonial companies by state bodies) must be considered
in this perspective.

We should argue that the current crisis of Third World agriculture
reflects the partial character of these reforms, inadequate to free
the peasants and the country from imperialist exploitation. We should
further argue that peasant super-exploitation has reached a degree
that endangers not only reproduction of the peasant producers
themselves (through famine, rural exodus, and so on) but industrial
development too, in the sense that agriculture gradually loses its
capability of ensuring acceptable prices for food crops, essential in
turn for exploitation of the working class. As is well known, the
response of monopoly capital to this crisis is to envisage a series
of technical innovations known as the 'green revolution'. These
innovations are certainly intended in part to raise the productivity
of peasant labour, but also and principally to integrate in the more
intensive relations dominated by agro-business transnationals. A
counterposing definition must be established as to the social,
economic and technical changes necessary to sustain a national and
popular programme capable of raising the living standards of the
peasants and workers, and broadening the material and social base of
the essential development of the forces of production.

The 'green revolution' of our day is undoubtedly different from the
'agricultural revolution' that preceded the industrial revolution in
18th century Western Europe but both these 'revolutions' lie within
the same overall perspective: that of making agriculture capable of
supplying the urban proletariat with the means of reproducing their
labour power. The 'agricultural revolution' of mercantilist and
physiocratic Europe fulfilled this essential role by disaggregating
feudal relations and transforming them into agrarian capitalist
relations. The methods of this transformation are peculiar to their
time: there were as yet no industries; the production of inputs for
the new agriculture was supplied by the labour of peasants and rural
artisans: the surplus food crops sold by the peasants and capitalist
farmers to the towns were delivered in their raw states without
significant processing.

The 'green revolution' of our day surfaced in regions integrated in a
global system already dominated by industry: that of the manufacture
of agricultural inputs (farm machinery, fertilizers, sprays, for
example) and of food industries offering urban consumers processed
foods, with a reduction of the artisanal or domestic labour to
prepare them in usable form. This 'revolution' certainly presupposes
the abolition of certain pre-capitalist relations that had become too
serious a handicap to agricultural modernization. Agrarian reforms
fulfilled this preliminary role in most of the Third World during the
three decades after the Second World War. Once this step had been
taken the 'green revolution' was on the agenda. It encouraged -
peasant or farming capitalist (kulak) - agriculture to integrate in
the upstream industries (supplying agricultural inputs) and
downstream industries (food processing). Who would control this
agro-industrial integration? That was the issue.

Capitalism's 'classic' solution is to operate this integration
through subjection of the farmers to industry, that is to the
monopolies of the agro-business. This evolution, which had its early
beginning in the United States and Canada and spread to the whole of
Western Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, is now
proposed for the Third World countries. It would have the effect not
only of transferring the benefit of peasant surplus labour to the
monopolies but also of worsening the overall national dependence of
peripherally capitalist societies on these monopolies, and further
accentuating the distortions of accumulation in these societies.

In the early 1960s and in the excitement of independence, there began
to develop in agriculture a sometimes rather impetuous movement of
modern petty commodity producers whenever favourable conditions
arose. We have suggested this to be the case where rural population
density was 'optimum' (of the order of 30 inhabitants to the square
kilometre) and where it was possible to attract wage labour by the
immigration of outsiders to the ethnic group of the area. This
movement encouraged the hope of the launch of an agricultural
revolution, reproducing, mutatis mutandis, a model common in 19th
century Europe. But the movement was soon smothered and had results
only on the scale of limited micro-regions (in the south of Côte
d'Ivoire and in Kenya for example) to the extent that on a
continental scale or even within the beneficiary countries the
overall results remained mediocre.7 The reason for this smothering is
related to the fact that this agriculture of 'modem farmers' is
super-exploited by the upstream industries (foreign in this instance)
supplying inputs and by the world market imposing real price cuts on
these export crops (the World Bank systematically encouraged
over-production for this purpose).

The second solution is to subject agriculture to the state - one
whose historical origins and class structure are integrated in
various ways in the world system. It might be a Soviet-type state,
contemptuous of the peasants, which sees the countryside as no more
than a manpower reserve for industrialization and the provider of
foodstuffs for the towns. It 'collectivizes' and 'modernizes' by
obliging the peasants to resort to mechanization, while retaining
control of the machinery - this was the formula of the Soviet machine
and tractor stations - just as it retains ownership and management of
the agricultural produce processing industries. But it might also be
a peripherally bourgeois state, one unable (for various particular
historical reasons in this or that instance) to base its overall
power on an alliance with an agrarian bourgeoisie, that becomes the
peasant's 'partner', or in fact his master. This form allows
exploitation of peasant labour to be subjected to the demands of
industrial accumulation.

The third solution which is still being sought, would entail a
genuine popular alliance with the peasants as genuine partners. In
this dispensation the sphere of activities controlled by the
peasantry could be extended to the upstream and downstream
industries. In other words the 'shearing' from prices unfavourable to
the rural community could be avoided by collective negotiation of the
relative prices of industry and agriculture. Maoism adopted this
principle, in intention at least. It was said of the Chinese commune,
created in 1957-58, that it was based on equality between the town
and countryside. The commune, as is well known, operated on three
levels: the team (the natural village) handling simple means of
production (draught equipment, hand tools), which - at China's level
of development of the forces of production - are still the mainstay
of agricultural production; the brigade handling modern equipment
utilized by several teams (machinery, transport vehicles,
improvements in the irrigation system, and so on); and finally the
commune handling some minor upstream industries (for example, tool
manufacture, workshops, rural building) and downstream (simple
processing: rice mills, shelling, grain mills, among others). Peasant
control in principle over these three levels, in marked contrast with
the Soviet machine and tractor stations, bore witness to the reliance
the authorities claimed to place on the peasantry and reflected the
reality of the worker and peasant alliance that gave substance to
this authority. The commune, moreover, in integrating social services
(health, education, and so on) and administrative powers into its
management system paved the way for an eventual integration of
political power and economic management. Undoubtedly the 'industries'
managed by the commune were still, at the current stage of the
country's development, rather elementary and team output accounted
for some 80% to 85% in value of the output of all three levels. In
addition, some - the most modern - of the inputs were provided for
agriculture by industry properly speaking, that is collectives of
urban workers (or the state).

Obviously the challenge to the system after the Mao Zedong's death
raises a question mark over the reality of the system as it was
operating in the 1960s and 1970s, but this goes beyond the scope of
this study. It has been argued that control of the communes really
remained in the hands of the party bureaucracy who imposed prices
less favourable than supposed. Deng Xiaoping relied on this argument
in order to dissolve the communes, 'decollectivize' and allow the
'market' to operate to the peasants' advantage, and thus correct the
terms of trade in a favourable direction, if not for the entire rural
community at least for the segments that succeeded in securing a
strong foothold in the new market for foodstuffs.8

It is impossible to define the exact forms of organization and
implementation of economic management and national and popular
politics formulated from a priori abstractions divorced from the
actual dialectic of relations between state, peasants and workers.
The principles emerging in this schema of the three outline models
do, however, merit systematic consideration.

Finally, an analysis of exploitation of peasant labour power
inevitably entails the closest examination of the organization of
commodity and non-commodity labour within the peasant family.
Obviously, the prices paid for peasants' labour decrease as they
correspond to an increase in the quantity of 'unpaid' labour, that is
the non-commodity labour by the peasant man, and much more often of
the peasant woman.

For want of the means, it is rare to find a precise measurement of
the quantity and character of the total labour supplied by the entire
peasant family. A comparison of this overall quantity of labour and
that supplied by the entire family of the worker under capitalist
industry would provide a measurement of the real gap between the
price of labour power at the periphery and at the centre of the
system. We argue that this gap would be even more massive than that
indicated solely by the double factorial terms of trade, which takes
into account only the comparative amounts of direct labour producing
goods.

<http://www.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/uu32me/uu32me02.htm#the
origins of africa's agricultural failure>   *****

Yoshie