ABSTRACT
In considering agricultural development and health issues in Sub-Saharan Africa, it is first necessary to eliminate the gloom and doom of much of the popular literature which emphasizes accelerating population growth and stagnant or declining per-capita agricultural production. With new technologies to increase water availability and soil fertility, there is substantial potential in other lower rainfall regions. Moreover, with the sequence of good rainfall years in the second half of the 1980s, there is reason to be optimistic about whether the recent droughts imply a climatic and vegetative shift (decertification) or only reflect a cyclical climatic phenomenon. There appear to be linkages between investment in health and agricultural development besides the obvious inference that healthier workers should be more productive workers. Semi-arid West Africa can be divided into three agro-climatic crop-production regions based upon rainfall and resulting vegetation. Moving from south to north, approaching the Sahara, the rainfall levels go down and cropping systems change.
