HOW CAN AFRICA SURVIVE?
Jennifer Seymour Whitaker
New York: Harper & Row, 1988
264 pp., $19.95
That Africa is in the throes of a deep economic crisis is well known. Most African leaders and intellectuals, however, tend to overstress its external causes, neglecting the domestic causes that have been significant, if not preeminent, in many African countries. Occasionally, a book appears offering a balanced and insightful analysis. Jennifer Whitaker's is one such book, and it stands far above most contemporary theses on Africa.
She sets out "to tell the whole story, as far as that is possible, of how African economics got stuck." Though this may sound ambitious, Whitaker does tell the story extremely well in readable, non-technical language. Why things went so wrong in Africa is carefully documented and discussed. Since this is the first step in a search for solutions, this book will be valuable to African leaders, policymakers, foreign aid donors, and well-wishers concerned about the future survival of Africa.
What has Gone Wrong?
Concerning what has gone wrong in Africa, Whitaker concedes that "this question has innumerable different answers."
Africa is out of phase with the times. Before the African countries begin their industrial revolutions, they are already at a disadvantage. Since independence in the early 1960s, Africa has exported agricultural commodities and minerals while importing everything required for modernization. Over the years, this has resulted in an increasingly lopsided balance sheet. And the gap is widening further as the international marketplace becomes glutted with farm products, and as robots in the industrialized countries compete with cheap Third World labor in producing consumer goods.
Continuing droughts play havoc with development plans, but Africa's troubles go beyond drought. In the mid-1970s, OPEC and international recession dealt the continent blows, suddenly changing trade patterns and draining monetary reserves. After the first oil shock of 1973, Africa lost 10 percent of its income, and again in 1979, sustained the same sort of blow--suffering altogether about five times the loss taken by the industrialized countries. Between 1980 and 1982, prices of the nonoil commodities that most of Africa sells declined by 27 percent.
Almost before anyone realized it, soaring population growth placed huge demands on resources. In 1960, African and South Asian rates of population growth hovered around 2.5 percent while Latin America was pushing 2.9 percent. Today, however, the two other Third World rates have fallen to 2.1 and 2.5 respectively, while Africa's has risen above 3 percent. If these trends continue, Africa's current population of over 500 million will double in the next several decades. Just to stay even, many African countries have applied for food aid. By 1985 the continent was importing two-fifths of its food supply, and about a third of its people depended wholly or partly on imported food.
Although most analysts saw these events as a
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