ABSTRACT
This chapter pays attention to three aspects of agricultural production for a wide range of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, classified according to their production performance. It focuses on long-term trends in total agricultural output and on the identification of factors responsible for differences in trends between groups of countries. The chapter deals with the issue of food production, the contrasting views expressed about the relationship between export crop production and food production for local consumption. It reviews the present pattern of agricultural production performance in order to trace factors responsible for the observed pattern. Agricultural commercialization plays an obvious role in economic growth. Economic policy is another important explanatory factor for poor agricultural performance and declining per capita food production. Government measures to stimulate commercial food growing generally aim at decreasing the production costs by various means, mostly to the benefit of technologically-advanced food farming on large-scale production units.
