budgets in many countries has been spent on subsidies (e.g. subsidies on the
price of fertilizers), presumably to compensate for high rates of taxation. As a
result, investment expenditures have been kept at a rather low level. ¹⁶ Third,
government resources have been excessively concentrated 'on a subsector of
relatively large-scale farmers' ( Johnston 1986: 163), as well as on large-scale,
capital-intensive, enclaved, and mostly unprofitable ventures, such as state
farms, big land settlement schemes, large-scale and ill-conceived irrigation
projects, public co-operatives, agro-business corporations, large-scale ranches
equipped with sophisticated infrastructure, etc. ¹⁷ Incidentally, this shows that
it is not very meaningful to talk about general exploitation of agriculturalists in
Africa. A small number of large private farms--owned by privileged farmers,
wealthy businessmen, or state employees--have often been provided with
generous loans, subsidies, infrastructure, and technical assistance ( Berry
1984: 80).

To sum up, the real challenge confronting African agriculture today is not so
much that of finding new political coalitions prepared to reverse 'faulty' pricing
policies. It is much more to solve the problem of how to generate technological
improvements on an endogenous basis and how to spread them out as quickly
as possible to large areas of the continent. This is not to say that a congenial
price environment is unnecessary for that purpose: low prices for agricultural
goods can indeed hamper agricultural growth by diverting resources to other
sectors, by inducing the farmers to consume more leisure, and by discouraging
investment in agriculture and the adoption of technical innovations (since real
returns are low and the savings pool is restricted). But it must be clearly
realized that a technological breakthrough of the kind needed in Africa today
will not be price induced. As Raj Krishna has put it, the price regime 'cannot
by itself explain the evolution of basic scientific knowledge and the level and
growth of public investment in research, extension, infrastructure, and human
capital . . .' ( Krishna 1984: 170). Therefore, 'the task of accelerating agri-
cultural growth is primarily techno-organizational' and the main aim of price
policies should be to avoid retarding or frustrating the main techno-
organizational effort ( Krishna 1970: 190).

Technological change, up to a certain point, can arise from the initiative of
the farmers themselves. Yet the cultivators' dynamism alone obviously cannot
be expected to produce agricultural innovations at the pace required. If
increasing pressure on land resources can lead to adaptive technical changes
when the rate of population growth is moderate, population-led agricultural
growth of the type analysed by Ester Boserup ( 1965 and 1981) is not a reliable

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