ABSTRACT
The discourse of market reform in developing countries in the last decade has been the product of an influential critique of agricultural performance in Sub-Saharan Africa [World Bank, 1981]. This critique identified a structural crisis in African agricultural development emanating from inappropriate domestic agricultural and macro-economic policies. Appropriate policies, which became conditions for programmatic financial aid, included (i) adjustment of domestic agricultural prices to align them with international ones (involving progressive phasing out of subsidies, pan-territorial pricing and trade restrictions) and (ii) the liberalisation of marketing systems such that the role of the state in distribution would be reduced to providing infrastructure and information and the role of private trade enlarged.
