It's hard now to imagine the euphoria of West African Independence. Achieved for the most part without bloodshed, ahead of the rest of black Africa. The dancing, the drumming, the singing. The dreams. Sixty years later all lost in the hard, cold reality of world competition. It's just as hard to imagine that only a little more than one hundred years ago there was no Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast or any of the other West African states as we know them today. The specifics of the West African creation were dictated by the presence of the different European nations and nationals - the British, the French, the Germans, the Portuguese - in the different territories.

This artificial construct, now collectively known as ECOWAS, survived fifty or sixty years of colonization, and it has now survived a similar period of Independence amid mounting challenges. My research for this article began with the latest UN Human Development Index. Of West Africa's fifteen nations, eleven, Niger, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Gambia, Cote d'Ivoire, Benin and Togo, are in the bottom twenty five countries on the HDI list. A further two, Senegal and Nigeria, are in the bottom forty one countries placed by the UN in the Low Human Development category. Just two, Ghana and Cape Verde, qualify for the Medium Human Development category. The West African average HDI (0.469) is well below the average for sub-Saharan Africa (0.523), revealing that even compared to its black African neighbours, West Africa performs poorly.

The UN's HDI uses indicators for health, education and income to develop a single number and rating for each country. Notwithstanding their importance, these indicators are not the only pointers to a nation's success or failure. One could also look at, among others, infrastructural development, environment and sanitation, security, and intangibles such as national cohesion and pride.

There are not very many ways for a country to escape underdevelopment. There is a small group of countries which has in the last fifty or sixty years, through human resourcefulness rather than God-given natural resources, escaped poverty into middle income or even high income status. A look at them should tell us much about the current prospects of West Africa. For those countries without spectacular natural advantages, such as massive amounts of oil or breathtaking tourist potential, education and/or agriculture have been keys to success.  For Singapore, the outstanding example, catapulting itself in less than two generations from third world to first world, and its fellow Asian tigers, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea, education was more important. For countries like Brazil, world-leading exporter of coffee, sugar cane and soybeans, and Malaysia, world-leading exporter of rubber and palm oil,  agricultural success laid the path to industrialization. Realistically, the two ways by which West Africa could pull itself out of its quagmire are through education and agriculture, linked to sound government policy. Educated people on average earn higher incomes than uneducated people, especially in urban areas. This is a fact of life. If you educate your citizenry they will find ways to make money for themselves, irrespective of what their government is doing. The other potential lifeline for West Africa is agricultural development. Even with an academically weak population, a cadre of productive, competitive farmers can do much to boost a country’s living standards.

The UN's HDI has given us an idea of where West African nations rank in education. How about agriculture, how does West Africa compare with the rest of the world? With very large rural populations dependent on the soil, this activity arguably is even more important to the region than education. This should be one activity where West Africa, with large amounts of fertile soil, plenty of rainfall, plenty of sunshine and large rural populations, this above all should be the area where West Africa comes into its own.  Agricultural production and productivity are key development indicators for West Africa not specifically covered by the UN HDI. How well does the West African farmer compare with his/her counterparts around the world? The 2015 report Agricultural Growth in West Africa, copublished by the FAO, ECOWAS and African Development Bank, reveals a gloomy picture despite its authors best efforts at optimism. The foreword highlights a renewed attention to agriculture around the continent and specifically in the ECOWAS region with "unprecedented opportunities along with new challenges". The report argues that West African countries have experienced sustained population and economic growth over two decades resulting in "a rapid expansion of domestic and regional food markets". Fair enough, we know that populations have been growing, arguably too rapidly, and so the domestic demand for food has been increasing. But how well have West African farmers been doing in the global competition to supply these expanding markets? Excerpts (pages 11 - 13):

The report proposes a veritable litany of reasons for this poor performance by West Africa's farmers (pages 13 - 17):


One is tempted to say if a critical failure requires 17 different explanations (I skipped some) then perhaps the respondents are unsure about the real cause! I have long felt that the land tenure system in Sierra Leone, which is particularly egregious in barring indigenes of the capital from property rights in the rest of the country, is the most important contributor to the nation's woes. In its analysis of West African agriculture, the FAO mentions land tenure, but as just one of 17 separate problems. With productivity (output per unit time and output per unit area) in West Africa generally lower than any other region of the world, the West African farmer is consigned to subsistence. The inevitable result is millions of destitute economic migrants showing up in cities which can ill accommodate them, causing a host of additional problems, not least of which is how to feed the erstwhile farmers. With high birth rates and improved health care, rural populations are expanding even in the face of overall urbanization; this is a problem that gets steadily worse with time not better!

The problem of low productivity compared to global benchmarks is one that has bedevilled West African agriculture for decades. It has flummoxed the world's best and brightest. The FAO, consultant to numerous Integrated Agricultural Development Plans, the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the IMF, national development assistance institutions such as DFID and USAID have advised copiously, sometimes conflictingly, on the conundrum to little apparent effect. A host of agencies, policies, plans and frameworks have been devised over the years, including the ECOWAP, the CAADP, the RAIP, the RAAF, the NAIP, the PCD-TASAN.  The 2012 FAO publication, Why has Africa Become a Food Importer, begins candidly,


I read with interest Deborah Brautigam's 1992 paper, Land Rights and Agricultural Development in West Africa: A Case Study of Two Chinese Projects, an analysis of two Chinese agricultural assistance projects in the 1980s, one in Sierra Leone and one in Gambia. The Chinese, the largest producers and consumers of rice in the world, famously determined to showcase their methods to the West African farmer in the hope of a lasting improvement in productivity. The demonstration worked only for the duration of the Chinese stay. A few years after they left, the projects had collapsed and the new techniques had been abandoned. The author, sympathetic to customary land tenure, sets out the economic arguments against it at the outset and then seeks to cast doubt on these arguments, without ever explaining her views on why West African agriculture performs so poorly. Critical of management failings and especially keen to highlight gender disparities, she apparently loses sight of the central argument that she herself stated in her opening:
She proceeds to concentrate on the failings of the state, but the fundamental debate is not about transferring communal land to the state (even though this may sometimes be the only way to achieve the ultimate objective). And simply recognizing and legitimizing customary rights does not solve the problem outlined by Ms Brautigam above. Customary, communal rights are the problem. Because humans all over the world are selfish beings and invest in themselves and their immediate family above their community. The ultimate objective is to transfer land to the individuals themselves. In freehold. In perpetuity, for them and their assigns.

...to part 2