The road half traveled: agricultural market reform in Sub-Saharan Africa

By Mylène Kherallah, C. Delgado, E. Gabre-Madhin, N. Minot, Michael E. Johnson. 2002

172 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article reviews the extensive evidence on agricultural market reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa and summarises the impact reforms have had on market performance, agricultural production, use of modern inputs, and poverty. It offers eight recommendations for completing the reform process and developing a new agenda for agricultural markets in Sub-Saharan Africa. The reform experience in Sub-Saharan Africa has varied widely across countries and crop subsectors. The available evidence shows clear progress in some areas and mixed results in others. Most reforms were only partially implemented and policy reversal was common. Once implemented, however, reforms have increased competition and reduced marketing margins, benefiting both producers and consumers. Reforms have also boosted export crop production. On the other hand, food crop production has stagnated and yields have not improved. Further expansion of private trade is constrained by lack of access to credit, uncertainty about the government’s commitment to reform, and high transaction costs.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e0181a41567e172ac7a36fd25bd5356aedc40b2d

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In Economics and Econometrics

1. B. Shiferaw
2. Bingxin Yu
3. G. Obare
4. G. Muricho
5. J. Isham
6. M. Kassie

In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

1. B. Shiferaw
2. Bingxin Yu
3. G. Obare
4. G. Muricho
5. J. Isham
6. M. Kassie
7. Leslie Lipper
8. S. Asfaw

In Soil Science

1. B. Shiferaw
2. A. N. Pratt
3. G. Obare
4. G. Muricho
5. J. Isham
6. M. Kassie
7. S. Asfaw
8. Leslie Lipper

Citations in the corpus

• Rural Institutions and Producer Organizations in Imperfect Markets: Experiences from Producer Marketing Groups in Semi-Arid Eastern Kenya.Socioeconomics and Policy Working Paper Series no. 23 (2006, background): “…after liberalization has been attributed to factors such as partial implementation of reforms and policy reversals (eg, Jayne et al. 2002; Kherallah et al. 2000; Jayne and Jones 1997) and lack of strong institutions that support market and private sector development (World Bank 2002a and…”
• An Updated Look at the Recovery of Agricultural Productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa (2009, background): “During this period, African governments followed a development strategy that prioritized industrialization, with a clear bias against agriculture (Kherallah et al. 2000).”
• The Effect of Social Capital on Fertiliser Adoption: Evidence from Rural Tanzania (2002, background): “Introduction(1) Despite being perhaps the most important purchased input in African agriculture, fertilizer has not grown in use among Tanzanian smallholder farmers since the early 1980s (Kherallah et al. 2000).”
• Rural Livelihoods and Poverty Reduction Strategies in Four African Countries (2004, unknown): “Fertiliser prices seem to have risen in real terms everywhere resulting in less use of purchased farm inputs than in the past [ Kherallah et al., 2000 ].”