Rethinking African Agriculture

How Non-Agrarian Factors Shape Peasant Livelihoods

Goran Hyden, Kazuhiko Sugimura, Tadasu Tsuruta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367513528
• eBook ISBN: 9780429879364
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

Rethinking African Agriculture argues that rural communities in Africa are still shaped by non-agrarian factors both in livelihood strategy and social formation.

This volume renews and deepens the research on the African peasantry by offering a fresh perspective drawn from the hitherto largely unknown Japanese research on the subject. The ethnographic fieldwork focuses not only on the micro environment of the producers but also the broader historical context in which they live and work. The contributors argue that, in comparison with other regions of the world, Africa has never passed through an agrarian revolution that would effectively change the mode of production from within. Modernization efforts from the outside have fallen far short of the ambition to transform agriculture in Africa. Rural Africa is still largely a natural society characterized by "non-agrarian" features as evident in people's livelihood, social organization, and farming systems.

This book will be of interest to social scientists and anthropologists focusing on African development, agriculture and agrarian societies,

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Peasant agriculture in Africa: science meets history
• 2 Missing out on the Agrarian Revolution: African peasantry in historical perspective
• 3 Economy of affection in Africa: the informal basis of development
• 4 Farming practices among African hunter-gatherers: diversifying without loss of the past
• 5 Shifting cultivators as generalist managers: the threat of “saving the rainforest”
• 6 Unique features of African agro-pastoralism: adapting life and sharing wealth in a fluid environment
• 7 Food sharing among commercial rice growers: persistence of the subsistence ethic in Kenya
• 8 Longstanding imprints of natural society: toward a new science of agriculture in Africa
• 9 Making innovation socially inclusive: lessons from the Bemba in Zambia
• 10 General conclusions: implications for research and policy
• About the authors
• References
• Index