CRG Seminar: South-South Divergence: How Southeast Asia and Tropical Africa grew apart before the Green Revolution

According to historical income estimates Southeast Asia and Tropical Africa were more or less at par in the 1960s. In 2020, per capita incomes in Southeast Asia were roughly three times higher than in Tropical Africa, while poverty rates had fallen under 5% in the former and exceeded 40% in the latter region. How do we make sense of this dramatic divergence of two tropical regions that shared largely comparable patterns of colonial resource extraction, labour coercion and primary commodity specialization before 1940? 

 

Recent accounts of the Asia-Africa divergence, which are predominantly proposed by development economists and political scientists, attribute the remarkable shift in economic fortune to two main factors. Firstly, a successful Green Revolution in Asia which has been juxtaposed to structural agricultural development failure in Africa (Hayami et al. 1998; Djurfeldt  et al. 2005; Larson & Otsuka 2013). Secondly, Asian governments have been credited with the adoption of solid macro-economic policies as well as effective and sufficiently flexible agricultural and industrial policies, while African governments have been charged with ‘urban bias’, corruption, ethnic favoritism and fiscal mismanagement, culminating in a prolonged debt crises during the 1980s and 1990s from which the region has barely recovered in the first quarter of the 21st century (Bates 1981; World Bank 1993; Kohli 2004; Franck & Rainer 2012; Berendsen et al. 2015; Henley 2015). 

 

Our book proposes a shift in attention to the deeper historical foundations of agricultural productivity growth and structural economic transformation. We argue that the roots of the Africa-Asia divergence can be traced back to at least a full century before the Green Revolution: the 1850-1940 era in which the twin forces of globalization and colonization encapsulated both regions. We show that Green Revolution technologies and pro-rural policies in Southeast Asia were accommodated by the emergence of a regionally integrated market for rice and immigrant labour before 1940, while these pre-conditions had not emerged in Tropical Africa. In Tropical Africa, agricultural commercialisation revolved exclusively around export crops such as palm oil, groundnuts, rubber, coffee, cocoa and cotton. In Southeast Asia, the range of export crops was smaller, but it did include the dominant food staple: rice. 

 

In the nine decades between 1850-1940 millions of Asian rice farmers as well as a bourgeois class of entrepreneurs were connected to rice trade networks that went beyond the typical colonizer-colonized matrix. These farmers obtained access to sources of capital and credit to expand their businesses, capital that was often supplied locally, or through investors from India and China. Commercially oriented grain production and capitalists also played their part in Tropical Africa, but their numbers were smaller, their businesses were narrower in orientation (e.g. very few rural industrialists) and they faced higher institutional barriers to market food crops and expand their businesses. Moreover, very little of the capital reached the African smallholder.

 

In sum, globalization and colonization intertwined with distinctively different processes of agricultural commercialisation and regional market integration. In Southeast Asia agricultural commercialisation was food-inclusive, in Tropical Africa it was food-exclusive. In Southeast Asia globalisation and colonisation stimulated a process of regional market integration. Tropical Africa was enmeshed in globalization without regionalization. These historical trajectories offered very different starting points for the possibilities of rapid agricultural productivity growth, and indeed, also for the policy options and constraints of Southeast Asian and African post-colonial governments.

This seminar is given by Prof. Ewout Frankema and organised by the Collaborative Research Group Governance, entrepreneurship and inclusive development.