Discussions of economic and agricultural development in Africa have focused heavily
in recent years on structural adjustment-i.e., basic policy changes aimed at allowing
international and domestic markets to play a greater role in coordinating national
economic activities. Often these structural adjustments and accompanying polices aimed
at improving economic performance have been based on several implicit assumptions
about how African food systems operate. Yet for many countries, there has been little
empirical information to test these assumptions. Hence, designing policies too often
becomes an exercise in planning without facts.
This paper argues that not only is there a need to base food security and structural
adjustment polices more firmly on empirical information, but that the process by which
the information is obtained is as important as the information itself. Agricultural
economists and other social scientists can and increasingly should design policy research
in Africa in ways that simultaneously increase effective demand for empirical
information as an input into the ongoing policy process and augment African capacity
continually to inform policy deliberations. We illustrate the payoffs to such an approach
by drawing on selected experience in several African countries (Weber).