This paper looks at the condition and progress of SSA's agriculture as central to growth, poverty reduction, access to employment income, and food security. Agriculture also greatly affects other major components of SSA's human development.

Cross-national regressions reveal abnormally low agricultural workforce shares, given GNP, in developing countries that had historically concentrated land into large capital-intensive farms. We argue that such deagriculturalisation was premature, since its concomitant labour shedding has...