ABSTRACT
Nineteen-eighty-four was an interesting year for Rwandan agriculture. The long rains, ordinarily tapering off at the end of May, stopped abruptly in mid-April. The early termination of the rainy season caused a serious production shortfall in beans, Rwanda's most im portant food crop, prompting the Government of Rwanda (GOR) to request 69,000 metric tons (MT) of emergency food aid from interna tional donors. It was not until the end of 1986 that the last of the 40,000 MT which the donors agreed to provide were delivered . While most of the imported food arrived well after the "crisis" had passed, and may have had a slight depressing effect upon domestic food mar kets, the crisis itself was noteworthy mostly for the attention it drew to the state of agricultural, and more broadly, economic develop ment in Rwanda: its chronic weaknesses, the failure of development programs to have much impact on economic growth, the Govern ment's agricultural strategy of auto-suffisance alimentaire (food self sufficiency), and the tactics employed by households to meet their food and cash needs under ordinary and extreme circumstances. While relief efforts in the Horn of Africa captured the world's at
tention at the time, Rwanda looked inward at the precariousness of its own food production system and posed a fundamental question: How can domestic agricultural production be increased? Increased produc tion is often viewed strictly as a supply-side issue and presupposes that it is a lack of modern technology which handicaps the producer.
