The growth performance of agriculture in subsaharan Africa

This paper explores the relative roles played by agricultural endowments, low population density, remoteness, and adverse policies in explaining the undercapitalization and the poor growth of African agriculture over the last century. We attribute the adverse performance largely to poor policies and to institutional failures, which plagued the continent for several centuries. However, we also explain how the adverse endowments could have contributed to the locking in of poor policies, and to the difficulties of breaking out of the adverse policy trap. The paper then describes the acceleration of agricultural growth during the 1990s, and explores the policy, institutional, and public investment agenda for the future.