ABSTRACT
The pattern of labor availability and use over the season is the key to understanding traditional African agricultural systems, and its quantification is the major objective of investigation. Planners have tended to overlook labor availability as a flow resource within the traditional community. In communities where the pattern of production responsibilities allocates fields to individuals or sex/age groups in the household, values can be based on an analysis of the rates of work of the discrete groups on the same operation. In a labor-limited system, general measures of labor availability and use are closely related to acreage. Labor use presents no conceptual difficulties although, as with availability, the importance of the flow of use over the season can stand reemphasis. The evidence to be presented in support of limited visits as an effective technique for the collection of labor data was accumulated between 1962 and 1966.
