ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the erratic progress with agricultural and rural development in most of the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The impact of the oil price rises in 1973/1974 and, particularly, in 1979 on sub-Saharan Africa, is widely discussed, although some commentators lay the blame for subsequent ills on the medicine of macro-level. The nature of the malaise virtually dictated the content of the structural adjustment reforms at the macro-level. The chapter summarizes the broad evolutionary progress of, and abrupt changes in, development strategies for the agricultural and rural sectors in East Africa. The centrepiece of agricultural policy in both post-independence Tanzania and Uganda was the tractorisation of labour-intensive cereal cultivation in peasant farming systems, using the four-wheel tractors demonstrated on large-scale settler-owned mixed farms. In agricultural and rural development work the focus for some time has been on participatory processes, aid partnerships, civil society organisations and sometimes the private sector too.
