ABSTRACT
For the past forty years, the academic orthodoxy has been that poverty in subSaharan Africa (SSA) could be broadly and significantly reduced by raising yields in small-farm agriculture. This orthodoxy is based on some combination of the arguments that:
• most of the poor in Africa live in rural areas; • the main reason for the prevalence of this rural poverty is the failure to
replicate the 1970s Asian Green Revolution in Africa; • securing strong yield growth in agriculture will generate higher incomes
where it matters most – for the small-farm household itself; • these higher incomes will be spent on locally produced goods and services,
thus generating cumulative spirals of increased rural activity and incomes; and
• substantial scope exists to raise yields through the application of new science and technology to African agriculture.
