INTRODUCTION 5
lar designs that drew on the colonial experience in South Asia, suggesting a one-size-fits-all approach that may have not been entirely appropriate for Africa’s many and varied socioeconomic contexts (Kabuga 2005; Develtere, Pollet, and Wanyama 2008).
In Francophone countries, the experience was somewhat different. Colo- nial legislation dating back to 1893 encouraged the establishment of Sociétés Indigènes de Prévoyance, de Secours et de Prêts Mutuels. These Provident Societies (which later became “Mutual Societies for Rural Development”) were intended to support the production of agricultural commodities among small and large farmers with both input and marketing services. As they evolved, they took on such characteristics as compulsory membership and became vehicles of state influence, though not to the extent seen in Anglo- phone Africa (Develtere, Pollet, and Wanyama 2008). It was not until immediately after independence that the issue of RPOs and small-scale farmers took center stage in the region’s agricultural sectors. Newly independent governments widely promoted them as a means of modernizing the agricultural sector while also building on traditional solidarity norms in rural communities (Bosc et al. 2003). For example, these RPOs played a role in improving access to household assets and agricultural services for small- scale farmers in Zimbabwe during the early 1980s and may have contributed significantly to the country’s food security following the protracted struggle for independence (Bratton 1986).
In most cases, these cooperatives were closely tied to centrally planned production and marketing systems—systems that were fairly unfamiliar to smallholders and were designed without allowances for direct control by the members themselves. They were, in effect, cooperatives without the ben- efit of cooperators (Bosc et al. 2003). Weak economic incentives, excessive state intervention, elite capture, and other forms of rent-seeking behav- ior did little to modernize agriculture or to generate the surpluses needed to foster wider growth, development, and poverty reduction (Lele 1981; Braverman, Guasch, and Huppi 1991; Deininger 1995; Jayne and Jones 1997; Bosc et al. 2003).
Policy reforms introduced under the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s in many Sub-Saharan African countries significantly diminished the role and influence of state-controlled RPOs throughout the region. Yet the private investors and entrepreneurs who were, in theory, expected to replace these cooperatives as intermediaries between supply and demand failed to materialize, except in a few isolated cases relating to high-value crops (Jayne and Jones 1997; Dorward et al. 2004; Piesse et al. 2005; World Bank 2008). Smallholders whose livelihoods depended on cereals and other food staples remained largely tied to the low-productivity, low-income trap.
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