Food Problems and Prospects in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Decade of the 1980's

Excerpts from the report Conclusions: The study draws the following specific conclusions from its analysis. 1. In the near term, the coordination of government policies in food production, marketing and trade offers the best hope of meeting food needs in Sub-Saharan Africa. 2. Slowing down the shift of urban consumer tastes to non-domestically produced foods and introducing new processing technologies for domestically-produced foods to make them more palatable and convenient afford some scope for diminishing imports. 3. The transformation of the subsistence sector, in ways that raise living standards and respect social values, should, and indeed must, be a longterm goal of African governments, both from the point of view of increasing food production and of generating national economy. 4. The study takes a time frame of ten years. But in the longer term, a solution of the food problem in Sub-Saharan Africa probably depends on basic investments in education and research. Policies and programs suggested above will inevitably be self-limiting unless they are backed up by an appropriate set of local institutions. Such institutions must bear the burden of raising the presently low status of agriculture so to upgrade human capita in food production, and of finding the answers to basic, unanswered questions about the capability of soils and crops to sustain a highly productive agriculture. Investments of this nature often do not have a high annual payoff, which may make them unattractive in the short term. The alternative, however, is an indefinite continuation of ad hoc policymaking.