A number of international agencies (as well as other prominent institutions and individuals) have issued reports assessing the “crises” now perceived to afflict “development” in Africa. The Organization of African Unity's Lagos Plan of Action (OAU, 1980) emphasized historical legacies, deteriorating terms of trade, and Africa's dependence on foreign markets, and set out elements for a general strategy to escape these constraints by building self-reliant, local, and regional economies. Various Food and Agriculture Organization documents (e.g., FAO, 1983) and UNICEF's State of the Children Report (UNICEF, 1983) provide particularly grim pictures of food and nutritional deficiencies. The Economic Commission for Africa, in its “silver jubilee report,” analyzing recent history, emphasized that, if present trends continue, the “scenario” after the next twenty-five years will be a “nightmare” of “poverty” and “degradation” of life (UN ECA 1983).

The World Bank's 1981 report, Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action (hereafter Accelerated Development) also portrayed a “crisis” situation in food and agricultural production and called for some major policy changes in response. This document has probably attracted the lion's share of attention, certainly controversy. There are several reasons why the report deserves careful study and concerned discussion: it is readable, provocative, and comprehensive; it focuses on what are perceived to be “immediate problems” which “must be addressed if the widespread decline in per capita output” is to be “reverse”; it sets out an “agenda” of new “policies and programs to bring about this essential improvement” in the “production base” (World Bank, 1983: 1).

Some events and settings stand out as important symbols of a historical period. Versailles, in my opinion, is such a symbol. Constructed at great cost by order of Louis XIV, Versailles symbolizes the isolation of the court of Louis XVI and the insensitivity of Marie Antoinette as expressed in the unforgettable lines: “The poor have no bread? Then let them eat cake.” More recently, in June of 1982, Versailles was the setting for the summit gathering of the heads-of-state of seven major industrialized countries. The response of these “guardians” of the present world order (or disorder) to the cries of the world's poor was an echo of Marie Antoinette: “The poor countries have no foreign exchange? Then let them eat monetarism.”

I could not escape this reflection and this symbolism as I re-read the World Bank Report, Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action (1981), and its recent follow-up, Sub-Saharan Africa: Progress Report on Development Prospects and Programs (1983, hereafter Progress Report). Scapegoating the victims seems to be a popular pastime in the drawing rooms of the wealthy. These World Bank reports, supported by country and sectoral studies of many African nations, manifest this same tendency of “blaming the victims.” They are classical expositions of “horse and sparrow economics,” patronizingly instructing the sparrows to improve their techniques so that they might more completely pick out the oats in the horses' droppings. But they are deadly serious, as the geography of hunger and hunger-related deaths again expands.

… Fragments of our lost kingdom …

Here the stone images

Are raised, here they receive

The supplication of a deadman's hand

Under the twinkle of a fading star.

—T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

There is an extraordinary degree of similarity throughout the region in the nature of the policy problems that have arisen and in the national response to them.

— Accelerated Development, p. 4

We asked for bread

And they chucked a stone at us.

— A senior African economic analyst's observations on Accelerated Development.

Economic growth implies using … scarce resources more efficiently…. Policy making inevitably has to embody wider political constraints and objectives…. The record of poor growth … suggests that inadequate attention has been given to policies to increase the efficiency of resource use and that action to correct this situation is urgently called for.

— Accelerated Development, p. 24

People … must be able to control their own activities within the framework of their communities. At present the best-intentioned governments—my own included—too readily move from a conviction of the need for rural development into acting as if the people had no ideas of their own. This is quite wrong … people do know what their basic needs are. If they have sufficient freedom they can be relied upon to determine their own priorities for development.

— President J. K. Nyere

Our own reality—however fine and attractive the reality of others may be—can only be transformed by detailed knowledge of it, by our own efforts by our own sacrifices.

— Amilcar Cabral

The World Bank has become a subject of controversy, of learned discourse and endless debates between the Left and the Right. The Bank has become the foremost multilateral international lending agency, with an expanding role covering a variety of sectors and involving billions of dollars worth of loans to the Third World, on terms that are not available from commercial banks.

As its role expanded, the Bank began to draw increasing attention, both favorable and critical. The London Economist recently called it “a bank for all seasons.” It is viewed differently by different people, depending on their ideological positions or perspectives. These perspectives may be reduced to two basic positions, divided along a Left/Center axis and a Center/Right axis.

The Left critique has found the Bank—on its record—an instrument of Western corporate capital (Hayter, 1972; Payer, 1982; Bello, 1982). The thrust of the Leftist argument is that the Bank has not proved to be useful to the great mass of the Third World peoples, and that the ruling elites of its borrowing countries have derived benefits from its lending activities. The argument also holds that multinational corporations stand behind its activities also benefiting by selling their goods, which are not a matter of basic necessity to the ordinary peoples.

The Centrist position is essentially supportive of the Bank's role as an important vehicle for the transfer of resources for development of the Third World and as a facilitator of trade among nations (Reid, 1975; Hurni, 1978; Krueger, 1982; Mason and Asher, 1974).

In a recent contribution, Bruce Johnston and William C. Clark (1983) deplore the “inconclusive skirmishes among development advisors” which lead to the danger that “those bent on self-interested efforts to exploit or to ignore the poor can invariably find some advisory recommendation to interpret as support for their favoured programs….” While “academic pursuits may thrive on conflict, effective implementation of a social action program requires substantial consensus … because policy makers, with their time and attention limited, otherwise find it difficult to make the ‘right purchases’ of policy options.” The “nay-sayers carry the day.”

All those who have, since September 1981, been parties to the discussion of the World Bank's Report on Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action (hereafter Accelerated Development) should take these warnings seriously. As the flow of words has increased, the crisis in Africa has deepened. While this paper adds to the flow of words, it attempts to find the commonalities upon which agreements for action can be based.

In particular, we attempt to clear up some widespread misunderstandings regarding the position taken by the report on certain key issues. After two years of intensive discussion, there is a clear need to reflect both on the markedly deteriorated global circumstances within which Africa has to live and to devise its programs, and on the component parts of Accelerated Development's Agenda for Action.

Attempts to increase food productivity, make the agricultural sector more cost efficient, improve diets of lower income people, and increase net incomes of farmers and livestock owners are receiving considerable interest on a worldwide basis. In many areas, however, these goals are not being met. In particular, livestock development programs in arid and semi-arid pastoral and sedentary regions in Africa have been especially discouraging. The general problem confronted in this article is to determine why the livestock industry is not developing, and to analyze alternatives related to one major source of concern: communally grazed areas.

Africa warrants a special place in development planning due to a multitude of non-economic factors. Political instability, language differences, and tribal and racial tensions have often tended to overshadow economic considerations (Bates, 1981). Perhaps most striking has been the heavy emphasis on equity considerations, possibly because many nations have recently emerged from colonial rule. The relatively short post emergence period (two to three decades in most cases) combined with the continent's economic and natural resource diversity, and a host of other factors such as trade policies, make analysis of economic development potential very difficult (World Bank, 1981).

It is evident that there is no one problem and no unique solution in denning policies related to Sub-Saharan Africa's livestock sector. Perhaps most important is to recognize that the various kinds of livestock systems themselves, as well as associated social institutions, are dynamic forces.

Africa has considerable potential for developing its fishery resources. Some of the world's richest fishing grounds lie off the coasts of Mauritania, Angola, Morocco, Nigeria, and Senegal. At present, these fisheries are exploited mostly (sometimes almost exclusively) by foreign fishing fleets from Japan, South Korea, the USSR, and several European countries. Official statistics indicate that foreign fishing off West Africa accounted for 1.2 million metric tons in 1976, or roughly 2 percent of the total worldwide marine catch. A Senegalese official claimed (quite plausibly) that those figures were too conservative and that foreign fishing amounted to “at least three times” the official foreign catch (United States Department of Commerce [hereafter USDOC], 1976). In response to this dependence on foreign fishing, several African countries are attempting to develop their own fishing fleets. Nigeria, in particular, has been rapidly expanding its fleet during the last decade (Marine Fisheries Review, 1982). The Organization of African Unity emphasized fisheries development in its 1980 Plan of Action (South, 1983a: 68). African nations are attempting to challenge the Foreign fishing companies' dominant position. As this paper will show, these efforts are likely to increase indigenous participation in the fishing industry.

The issue of economic nationalism in the Third World has been widely discussed. It is frequently noted that Third World countries are now adopting aggressive policies toward foreign investors. Many countries require foreign investors to establish joint ventures in certain industries, to employ indigenous personnel, to share technology, and to construct local manufacturing and processing facilities.