ABSTRACT
The World Bank, the African Development Bank and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) all have posed the question: Can Africa claim the twenty-first century? The question followed studies and initiatives concerned with the fate of humanity in the twenty-first century, specifically with the nature and consequences of global inequality. Indeed, initiatives and activities such as the 2000 UN Millennium Summit’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the civil society organisation Jubilee 2000’s Campaign for Debt Relief in poor countries, were all geared towards addressing the nature of global poverty and inequality. Two other institutional initiatives concerned with these global disparities, the New Partnership for African Development (Nepad) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) form the basis of this chapter. This chapter focuses on their implications for African agricultural development. Agriculture continues to feature prominently in the development prospects in Africa because of the importance of the sector to political, economic and sociocultural relations. Hence, the long held view that if ‘agriculture is in trouble, Africa is [also] in trouble’.1
