Dawson, N. and Martin, A. and Sikor, T.
(2016)
Green revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa: Implications of
imposed innovation for the Wellbeing of rural smallholders.
World Development, 78.
pp. 204-218.
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Abstract
Green Revolution policies are again being pursued to drive agricultural growth and reduce poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa.
However conditions have changed since the well-documented successes of the 1960s and 1970s benefitted smallholders in southern Asia
and beyond. We argue that under contemporary constraints the mechanisms for achieving improvements in the lives of smallholder
farmers through such policies are unclear and that both policy rationale and means of governing agricultural innovation are crucial
for pro-poor impacts. To critically analyze Rwanda’s Green Revolution policies and impacts from a local perspective, a mixed methods,
multidimensional wellbeing approach is applied in rural areas in mountainous western Rwanda. Here Malthusian policy framing has
been used to justify imposed rather than ‘‘induced innovation”. The policies involve a substantial transformation for rural farmers from
a traditional polyculture system supporting subsistence and local trade to the adoption of modern seed varieties, inputs, and credit in
order to specialize in marketable crops and achieve increased production and income. Although policies have been deemed successful
in raising yields and conventionally measured poverty rates have fallen over the same period, such trends were found to be quite incongruous
with local experiences. Disaggregated results reveal that only a relatively wealthy minority were able to adhere to the enforced
modernization and policies appear to be exacerbating landlessness and inequality for poorer rural inhabitants. Negative impacts were
evident for the majority of households as subsistence practices were disrupted, poverty exacerbated, local systems of knowledge, trade,
and labor were impaired, and land tenure security and autonomy were curtailed. In order to mitigate the effects we recommend that
inventive pro-poor forms of tenure and cooperation (none of which preclude improvements to input availability, market linkages,
and infrastructure) may provide positive outcomes for rural people, and importantly in Rwanda, for those who have become landless
in recent years. We conclude that policies promoting a Green Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa should not all be considered to be propoor
or even to be of a similar type, but rather should be the subject of rigorous impact assessment. Such assessment should be based not
only on consistent, objective indicators but pay attention to localized impacts on land tenure, agricultural practices, and the wellbeing of
socially differentiated people.
| Item Type: |
Article
|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: |
Sub-Saharan Africa, Malthusian trap, agricultural modernization, impact assessment, policy framing, Rwanda |
| Author Affiliation: |
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK |
| Subjects: |
Plant Production |
| Divisions: |
General |
| Depositing User: |
Mr T L Gautham
|
| Date Deposited: |
09 Mar 2016 04:54 |
| Last Modified: |
09 Mar 2016 04:54 |
| URI: |
http://eprints.icrisat.ac.in/id/eprint/14207 |
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