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Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies
Most Africans live in rural areas and derive their incomes from farming; but because African governments follow policies that are adverse to most farmers' interests, these countries fail to produce enough food to feed their populations. Markets and States in Tropical Africa analyzes these and other paradoxical features of development in modern Africa and explores how governments have intervened and diverted resources from farmers to other sectors of society. A classic of the field since its publication in 1981, this edition includes a new preface by the author.
195 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
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178 people want to read
About the author
Robert H. Bates
53 books6 followersRobert Hinrichs Bates (born 1942) is an American political scientist. He is Eaton Professor of the Science of Government in the Departments of Government and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. From 2000-2012, he served as Professeur associe, School of Economics, University of Toulouse.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
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January 28, 2022What an elegant book, argued convincingly without an ounce of fat -- a real model for how good a book on economics can be. It deserves a place alongside "How Asia Works" and "Seeing Like a State" as a must-read to understand why the world is the way it is.
Bates forcefully makes the case that bad agricultural policy is a root cause of disappointing African economic growth. Put briefly, most African economies are centered on agriculture, and most of the poor are farmers. Independence leaders (like their counterparts in East Asia and elsewhere) came to power promising development, which in their eyes naturally meant industrialization. To finance their industrial projects, they needed to extract funds from agriculture, which meant that state marketing boards set a price for farmers that was artificially low -- an implicit tax on rural areas. (Many of these marketing boards, and their pricing policies, were holdovers from the colonial era.) Another impetus was to placate urban discontent through low food prices. While these policies may have originally intended to promote development, they eventually ossified into standard interest group politics -- elites keeping the farmers down, and skimming a healthy profit off the top. To maintain the status quo, these states maintain a confusing tangle of input subsidies and implicit taxes that divide farmers into winners and losers, preventing collective action. And that pretty much brings us to the present day.
(For fans of Joe Studwell's "How Asia Works", these policies sound like a dark mirror of what occurred in East Asia around the same time. Korea, Taiwan, and Japan had similar policies to squeeze agriculture to fund industrialization but with radically different results. Why? Studwellians out there are surely crying "land reform! Land reform!" but I will need to think more about how exactly that worked. Perhaps the interaction between the Green Revolution, which was more successful in East Asia at raising yields, and land redistribution, which ensured the gains were widely spread, helped mask the fact that the farmers were getting a raw deal.)
Of course this is not the only reasonable theory out there. As Bates notes in his updated introduction, this book has precious little discussion of how external factors, from foreign bombs to commodity prices, have hamstrung development (the dependency theorists would like a word). But Bates's model of competing local interest groups rings true to me, and surely is a central part of the puzzle.
Bates forcefully makes the case that bad agricultural policy is a root cause of disappointing African economic growth. Put briefly, most African economies are centered on agriculture, and most of the poor are farmers. Independence leaders (like their counterparts in East Asia and elsewhere) came to power promising development, which in their eyes naturally meant industrialization. To finance their industrial projects, they needed to extract funds from agriculture, which meant that state marketing boards set a price for farmers that was artificially low -- an implicit tax on rural areas. (Many of these marketing boards, and their pricing policies, were holdovers from the colonial era.) Another impetus was to placate urban discontent through low food prices. While these policies may have originally intended to promote development, they eventually ossified into standard interest group politics -- elites keeping the farmers down, and skimming a healthy profit off the top. To maintain the status quo, these states maintain a confusing tangle of input subsidies and implicit taxes that divide farmers into winners and losers, preventing collective action. And that pretty much brings us to the present day.
(For fans of Joe Studwell's "How Asia Works", these policies sound like a dark mirror of what occurred in East Asia around the same time. Korea, Taiwan, and Japan had similar policies to squeeze agriculture to fund industrialization but with radically different results. Why? Studwellians out there are surely crying "land reform! Land reform!" but I will need to think more about how exactly that worked. Perhaps the interaction between the Green Revolution, which was more successful in East Asia at raising yields, and land redistribution, which ensured the gains were widely spread, helped mask the fact that the farmers were getting a raw deal.)
Of course this is not the only reasonable theory out there. As Bates notes in his updated introduction, this book has precious little discussion of how external factors, from foreign bombs to commodity prices, have hamstrung development (the dependency theorists would like a word). But Bates's model of competing local interest groups rings true to me, and surely is a central part of the puzzle.
March 18, 2025
yes i know the iliad and carrie soto are in my currently reading. yes i finished reading this before i finished them. please do not think that this is an accurate representation of my character. please. i’m a star.
August 12, 2016
Robert Bates' book does several things. The first and most obvious is try to explain the puzzle of falling agricultural output and agricultural exports across Africa during the 1970s. Bates argues that the explanation for this decline in output is not climatic or geographic, but the result of political economy.
The second purpose of the book is to explain the development of agricultural policy in Africa since decolonization. The primary institution of interest in the book is the agricultural marketing board, which is a legally-sanctioned monopsony buyer and exporter of agricultural products in a country. Bates traces how marketing boards, which originally emerged in the colonial periods as institutions of social insurance, became sources of revenue and instruments of development for African countries over time. Bates discusses the differences between the political economy of export crops and those for domestic consumption, the different interests as well as the intersection between urban workers, manufactures and secondary producers, and different interests within rural farmers. To take a simple example, governments are more responsive to urban workers than rural farmers because the former is a relatively concentrated interest (in terms of organizational capital as well as spatially) compared to the latter.
The third argument of the book is that developmentalist ideas failed in Africa when state-led industrialization, export controls, and domestic price controls ran ground on the rocky shoals of rent-seeking and corruption. The book documents how politically rational agents pursue economic policies such as rent-seeking and redistribution from poor peasants to politically connected companies that harm the long-term growth prospects of their countries.
The second purpose of the book is to explain the development of agricultural policy in Africa since decolonization. The primary institution of interest in the book is the agricultural marketing board, which is a legally-sanctioned monopsony buyer and exporter of agricultural products in a country. Bates traces how marketing boards, which originally emerged in the colonial periods as institutions of social insurance, became sources of revenue and instruments of development for African countries over time. Bates discusses the differences between the political economy of export crops and those for domestic consumption, the different interests as well as the intersection between urban workers, manufactures and secondary producers, and different interests within rural farmers. To take a simple example, governments are more responsive to urban workers than rural farmers because the former is a relatively concentrated interest (in terms of organizational capital as well as spatially) compared to the latter.
The third argument of the book is that developmentalist ideas failed in Africa when state-led industrialization, export controls, and domestic price controls ran ground on the rocky shoals of rent-seeking and corruption. The book documents how politically rational agents pursue economic policies such as rent-seeking and redistribution from poor peasants to politically connected companies that harm the long-term growth prospects of their countries.
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October 22, 2014Robert Bates’ Markets and States in Tropical Africa: This is perhaps as good as it gets in one, succinct volume: a clear and coherent analysis of why post-colonial Africa’s agricultural policies have been so poor, and more generally why African development has failed. Along with Michael Lipton, Bates helped develop the theory of ‘urban bias,’ whereby governments were worried about urban dwellers overthrowing their regimes and were thus more interested in keeping urban food prices down than in paying farmers full prices for their crops.
- Chris Blattman
- Chris Blattman
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August 29, 2020In the post-independence era, why did African governments tend to intervene in agricultural markets, and what are the implications for politics and economic development? First published in 1981, this is a classic text on the political economy of economic development. In the words of Bates, its major contributions include pioneering the use of rational choice theory (then primarily the domain of economics) in studying politics, and emphasizing internal dynamics of countries in studying common development challenges over international forces. It's important to note that the focus of this book is historical however, and in the version I've read Bates includes a number of updates as prefaces (the most recent from 2005, which discusses the beginnings of wide-ranging economic growth that was beginning in the early 2000s) and as a very interesting final chapter (9). In the below summary, I use the term "develop" to refer to economic development.
In the first part of the book, Bates identifies the ways in which African governments intervene in agricultural markets. For example they act as sole purchasers of export crops through state sanctioned marketing boards, accruing surpluses . They manipulate prices through a combination of trade restrictions and currency devaluation, and again use commercial boards to intervene in domestic food markets. Recognizing what Bates characterizes as a failure of price policies, they have intervened indrectly by subsidizing the costs of farming inputs such as fertilizer, or purchasing farms directly and entering the market as a competitor. Bates also shows they intervene in the (then) nascent industrial sector, engaging in protectionism in a way that increases prices for non-food items. According to Bates, the reasons that African governments intervene in agricultural markets include that they need money to finance development projects, and they intervene to keep food prices artificially low for urban workers. The net result of this, however, has been the accrual of rents and the adoption of policies that are favorable to specific interest groups; urban workers, industrial sectors and more generally to the bureaucracy, while small-scale and rural farmers (often the majority of the population) lose out. Bates makes his case primarily by drawing on scattered data and country-specific cases, which he uses to make generalizations. He is clear to distinguish when the data are lacking and when he finds the evidence to be more convincing, but I couldn't help but be reminded of more recent discussions of the poor quality of statistics in many low- and middle-income countries, particularly during the period Bates is writing from (see Morten Jerven, for example).
Interesting for me were the comparisons Bates makes between African and other developing countries. For example, a distinction he finds is in other regions, a key post-independence development strategy was to displace or find ways of reducing the power of rural landowners; in African countries no such constituency existed at independence, and so the task was different. Also he discusses the perceived necessity of developing countries to undergo an inefficient early stage of industrial protectionism which results in (necessarily) higher prices for consumers; for Bates, the evidence from other countries is not at all clear on this, and should serve as a warning (p. 76).
In the second part of the book, Bates details the consequences of government intervention. For one, rural producers "use the market against the state" by withdrawing from production or shifting to more profitable forms, or migrating to areas where production is more profitable. Or they may mobilize collectively to change prices, though Bates notes this will be more successful where costs are lower (usually facing larger, urban farms/firms). More broadly, and as already stated, intervention in markets can create administratively determined rents that can be used for private enrichment or for political gain. Governments can use force directly to weaken political opposition (which often hurts rural, small-scale producers) or indirectly by "picking winners" in a way that results in losses for the smaller producers. Ch. 8 reviews the commonalities and variations of the discussion across countries, and makes for an interesting read -- for example, the marketing boards in the post-independence era developed differently in East Africa and elsewhere in a way that may have had later consequences for country economies. Ch. 9 acts as a postscript, written from the mid 2000s as a way of accounting for the relative recent success of African economies within the framework set out by the book. Admittedly I found the chapter a bit scattered and hard to follow, but I think it makes for an interesting read for the authors comments on geopolitical events and the relationship of international actors (World Bank, IMF, etc) and African governments in the aftermath of the Cold War. I also found the discussion of the decline in public sector wages and challenges from state bureaucracy (p. 140-142) interesting.
In the first part of the book, Bates identifies the ways in which African governments intervene in agricultural markets. For example they act as sole purchasers of export crops through state sanctioned marketing boards, accruing surpluses . They manipulate prices through a combination of trade restrictions and currency devaluation, and again use commercial boards to intervene in domestic food markets. Recognizing what Bates characterizes as a failure of price policies, they have intervened indrectly by subsidizing the costs of farming inputs such as fertilizer, or purchasing farms directly and entering the market as a competitor. Bates also shows they intervene in the (then) nascent industrial sector, engaging in protectionism in a way that increases prices for non-food items. According to Bates, the reasons that African governments intervene in agricultural markets include that they need money to finance development projects, and they intervene to keep food prices artificially low for urban workers. The net result of this, however, has been the accrual of rents and the adoption of policies that are favorable to specific interest groups; urban workers, industrial sectors and more generally to the bureaucracy, while small-scale and rural farmers (often the majority of the population) lose out. Bates makes his case primarily by drawing on scattered data and country-specific cases, which he uses to make generalizations. He is clear to distinguish when the data are lacking and when he finds the evidence to be more convincing, but I couldn't help but be reminded of more recent discussions of the poor quality of statistics in many low- and middle-income countries, particularly during the period Bates is writing from (see Morten Jerven, for example).
Interesting for me were the comparisons Bates makes between African and other developing countries. For example, a distinction he finds is in other regions, a key post-independence development strategy was to displace or find ways of reducing the power of rural landowners; in African countries no such constituency existed at independence, and so the task was different. Also he discusses the perceived necessity of developing countries to undergo an inefficient early stage of industrial protectionism which results in (necessarily) higher prices for consumers; for Bates, the evidence from other countries is not at all clear on this, and should serve as a warning (p. 76).
In the second part of the book, Bates details the consequences of government intervention. For one, rural producers "use the market against the state" by withdrawing from production or shifting to more profitable forms, or migrating to areas where production is more profitable. Or they may mobilize collectively to change prices, though Bates notes this will be more successful where costs are lower (usually facing larger, urban farms/firms). More broadly, and as already stated, intervention in markets can create administratively determined rents that can be used for private enrichment or for political gain. Governments can use force directly to weaken political opposition (which often hurts rural, small-scale producers) or indirectly by "picking winners" in a way that results in losses for the smaller producers. Ch. 8 reviews the commonalities and variations of the discussion across countries, and makes for an interesting read -- for example, the marketing boards in the post-independence era developed differently in East Africa and elsewhere in a way that may have had later consequences for country economies. Ch. 9 acts as a postscript, written from the mid 2000s as a way of accounting for the relative recent success of African economies within the framework set out by the book. Admittedly I found the chapter a bit scattered and hard to follow, but I think it makes for an interesting read for the authors comments on geopolitical events and the relationship of international actors (World Bank, IMF, etc) and African governments in the aftermath of the Cold War. I also found the discussion of the decline in public sector wages and challenges from state bureaucracy (p. 140-142) interesting.
January 31, 2020
Bates provides an elegant but simplistic explanation of (1) why African governments implemented anti-farmer policies despite having predominantly rural constituencies and (2) why these governments have maintained power. He argues that state intervention has benefited manufacturing sector, urban residents, and large-scale farmers but harmed small-scale farmers. This is because government policy aims to induce industrialization and garner the political support of elites. Small-scale farmers, numerous they may be, exerted little policy influence because they could not overcome the collective action problem, which posits that large groups face steep barriers to collective action. He supports this claim with a political economy analysis of four policies: (1) crop pricing, (2) food pricing, (3) farm inputs, and (4) industrial goods pricing. In each case, Bates shows through statistical, historical, and interview data that peasants always receive the short end of the stick.
Bates's book is nestled comfortably within the rational choice tradition. Given this, I have two issues with Bates's framework. First, his theory is weakened by its omission of ethnic conflict and its potential relationship to agricultural policy. Many of the countries that Bates examined—Sudan, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast—have experienced high and/or low intensity ethnic conflicts. It is likely that agricultural policy is shaped by these ethnic cleavages. Any explanation of African agricultural policy that does not account for the role of ethnic conflict is an incomplete one. Second, he assumes that the sole distinction between small-scale farmers and large-scale farmers are their respective material endowments. This is an implausible assumption. There has been a lot of research done on the dispositions of small-scale farmers vis-a-vis the land. For example, land is not just an economic resource for peasants—it's so much more than that. We cannot say the same for plantation owners.
Despite my misgivings, I still think that this is well worth reading. I enjoyed it. It provides a sound but incomplete explanation of African agricultural policy. To be completely transparent, my problems with the book may have more to do with my mild dislike for rational choice theory rather than any substantial flaws. Those who don't share my distaste will probably enjoy this much more than I did.
Bates's book is nestled comfortably within the rational choice tradition. Given this, I have two issues with Bates's framework. First, his theory is weakened by its omission of ethnic conflict and its potential relationship to agricultural policy. Many of the countries that Bates examined—Sudan, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast—have experienced high and/or low intensity ethnic conflicts. It is likely that agricultural policy is shaped by these ethnic cleavages. Any explanation of African agricultural policy that does not account for the role of ethnic conflict is an incomplete one. Second, he assumes that the sole distinction between small-scale farmers and large-scale farmers are their respective material endowments. This is an implausible assumption. There has been a lot of research done on the dispositions of small-scale farmers vis-a-vis the land. For example, land is not just an economic resource for peasants—it's so much more than that. We cannot say the same for plantation owners.
Despite my misgivings, I still think that this is well worth reading. I enjoyed it. It provides a sound but incomplete explanation of African agricultural policy. To be completely transparent, my problems with the book may have more to do with my mild dislike for rational choice theory rather than any substantial flaws. Those who don't share my distaste will probably enjoy this much more than I did.
September 24, 2023
The aithor's premise is as follows.
Upon independence, African nations began a mad rush towards industrialization. Authoritarian government set economic conditions in where the agrian sectors of the economy carried much of the financial burden required in hopes of going through a rushed industrialization process. As political institutions changed, becoming more liberalized, pressures on agriculture softened. Economies as a whole began to grow and develop at a natural pace.
Lessons, too much government involvement and centralized planning in the economy often leads to inefficiency and slowed development. There is often no sustainable shortcut to development.
Upon independence, African nations began a mad rush towards industrialization. Authoritarian government set economic conditions in where the agrian sectors of the economy carried much of the financial burden required in hopes of going through a rushed industrialization process. As political institutions changed, becoming more liberalized, pressures on agriculture softened. Economies as a whole began to grow and develop at a natural pace.
Lessons, too much government involvement and centralized planning in the economy often leads to inefficiency and slowed development. There is often no sustainable shortcut to development.
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April 21, 2020State-led industrialisation prioritises politics over economics, and this is a common struggle in the non-developed world, especially those with rich natural resources.
May 7, 2019
This book is admirable for its brevity, lucidity, and analytical value. It's one of the most readable, digestible, in-plain-English works of political science that I've read. The key takeaway for me was that the policymakers in West African countries face perverse incentive structures that lead to the rural populations (who are the majority) getting screwed by the urban minority. This argument provides a very useful methodology for studying any regime and I think it remains relevant for understanding the politics of development today.
May 10, 2014
Robert Bates' study asks an important questions of how certain African states adopt agricultural policies that actually harmful to their constituents that are largely farmers. Here we see a story of the state as agent of transformation like in Scott's theory. The African states, largely postcolonial states, as told in Scott's story has a mission to transform their traditional society and economy. Bates writes about the effort to shift the base of their (these African states) economy from agricultural production to manufacture. In order to do so, the states need to be empowered in term of resources. Therefore, these African states deliberately extract revenues and resources from the agricultural rural production which is their most profitable sector. Their strategy of extracting revenues and resources from the agricultural sector distorts the agricultural market by having an institution like the monopsony that monopolize buying and selling of produce. Revenues gained from this market intervention then used to build modern economy and at the same time sustain and defend the longevity of the regime and the state.
May 23, 2016
I am studying for my prelims but so far this is the only entire book I have read. People who want to know more about food and agricultural policy in sub-Saharan Africa should, ya know, read this, because that's what it's about.....state price boards....administratively generated rents...subsidy..............development..................But this book is a classic so that's why it ends up on prelim lists.
March 27, 2011
Bates does an incredibly job of explaining how poverty in Africa is perpetuated through state agricultural policies. This is a seminal book for understanding poverty in African states. I recommend this to anyone interested in international affairs or economic and political development.
August 9, 2011
A very elegant book. It is easy to throw that word around, but I am not using it rashly. This is a foundational/cornerstone piece of work that must be read by anyone interested in the political economy of agriculture.
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October 24, 2008I read this for my African politics class...it's basically about how African governments are screwing peasants much more effectively than US farm subsidies ever could.
January 15, 2010
Very insightful to the struggles and troubles of the African people, and why they have had little success in developing their economy.
December 28, 2025
Hell yeah man love this. Interesting examples, well written. Engaging stuff. Feeding my econ-polisci brain with some good nutrition tonight.
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