ABSTRACT

This chapter seeks to understand the extent and influence of agricultural marketing reform in Africa since the onset of structural adjustment at the beginning of the 1980s. The jury is still out, of course, on what structural adjustment as a whole has achieved (Sachs and Warner, 1997; Fischer et al., 1998); still less do we know what has been the payoff to particular elements within the reform package. And yet such knowledge is vital if we are to learn from the experience of the years since 1980 and achieve more effective and more humane policies in future. The chapter focuses on one of the key elements of ‘bad policy’ as visualised by the architects of structural adjustment in Africa – price distortions in agriculture – and asks what reform has done to correct them, what have been the determinants of progress or the lack of it, and what the impact of reform in this area has been. In particular we wish to understand what agricultural price reform has contributed to poverty reduction by lowering the cost of food for poor people.