ABSTRACT
Africanist development specialists, including geographers, rarely treat the roles of land and labor and their ecological dimension with as much rigor as they analyze the role of capital. This chapter shows that Africa's agricultural resources are characterized by some basic shortcomings. It shows how Sub-Saharan Africa's (SSA) physical resources, including minerals, have been rendered largely non-developmental by the export biased mode of activity of the postcolonial state in SSA. The basic demographic constraints of Africa's population reside in four areas: absolute numbers of size, selective migration, age and gender structure and settlement density. The aggravation of these basic population constraints by structural hegemony of SSAs economic system has taken many forms. The relative deprivation of the northern provinces in Ethiopia and the concentration of social and productive investment in the southern and south-eastern provinces of the country is a good illustration of structural hegemony and its selective exposure of territories to subsistence stress.
