Sub-Saharan African countries, with their initially large agricultural sectors, urbanize and reduce poverty most rapidly and efficiently when they achieve rapid agricultural growth. The first sections of this paper analyze those relationships. That is followed by analysis of the core requirements for achieving rapid agricultural growth. The analysis is clear that public sector investment and institutions are the prime drivers of rapid agricultural growth and its favorable impact on overall growth and poverty reduction. Public sector support drives growth in the private sector dominated agricultural sector.

The core requirements for rapid agricultural growth and poverty reduction are:

1. Leadership from the Chief of State;
2. A Quantified Plan and its means of implementation;
3. Large scale Rural Infrastructure investment; two Ministry of Agriculture functions; 4. Research, and;
4. Extension;
5. Large scale private sector provision of inputs and marketing of outputs; and
6. Implementation Institutions at the local level.

Rapid Agriculture Growth and Poverty Reduction Rapid agricultural growth reduces poverty by increasing employment. That large scale increased employment, in large part of the rural and urban poor, provides increased income and hence poverty reduction.

Throughout this paper a six percent agricultural growth rate is considered as rapid agricultural growth, and a feasible target. That is the figure in a widely cited, large scale, African Union study (Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme, CAADP). Ethiopia exceeded this growth rate throughout the current period dating back to 1993. Rwanda has also exceeded this target for a significant period.

The magnitudes and processes relating rapid (six percent) agricultural growth to poverty reduction are illustrated with Ethiopian data (Table 1.) The first two columns state the base conditions. Rural households comprise 80 percent of total households and 58 percent of total GDP. The rural sector is large as is typical for Sub-Saharan Africa. Over half of rural households are rural non-farm. Urban households comprise 20 percent of total households and 42 percent of GDP.

The six percent growth rate assumed for the agricultural sector stimulates a 5.7 percent growth rate in the rural nonfarm sector and 5.5 percent growth rate in rural household GDP. With an 8 percent growth rate assumed for the urban sector overall growth in GDP is 6.4 percent.

The employment growth rate is only 1.8 percent for the small commercial farmers, but a rapid 5.1 percent rate for farmer driven rural non-farm households. The source of income for the rural non-farm households is expenditure by small commercial farmers. That is the driver of poverty reduction. The shares of overall employment growth with these assumptions is 18 percent in small commercial farming households, 60 percent in rural non-farm and 22 percent in urban.

Compared to a three percent agricultural growth rate (taken as the “natural growth rate, without government growth policy) fast growth (6%) provides 68 percent faster growth rate in employment (3.7 percent compared to 2.2 percent.) The fast employment growth figure is well above the population growth rate. The low growth figure is well under it.

Agriculture and Urbanization
 Rural non-farm households increasingly live in market towns. In Ethiopian data they are counted as rural not urban. That is sensible since they are economically driven by small commercial farm expenditures. As they grow they increasingly acquire an economic base out of agriculture and become more fully urban. Accelerated agricultural growth stimulates a geographically dispersed pattern of accelerated urbanization.

Again, illustrating with Ethiopian data (Mellor 2017), six percent agricultural growth results in rural non-farm growth providing 60 percent additional employment three times that compared to the 22 percent for urban growth.

Core Requirements for Rapid Agricultural Growth
1. Leadership from the Chief of State

As will be clear throughout this paper, rapid agricultural growth is implemented by the private sector but driven by public sector investments and policies. Many Ministries as well non-governmental institutions are involved and so the Chief Minister must provide the leadership. That is justified by the large economy wide benefits of accelerated agricultural growth.

Given the complexity of rapid agricultural growth, there must be an explicit, plan, quantifying the components of that growth, with emphasis on public sector requirements, and how they are to be implemented. Agricultural conditions vary greatly over small regions and so the details of one plan will not fit all of Africa.

The basis for national plans is provided by the African Union sponsored large scale effort – CAADP. The successful national plans, e.g. Ethiopia, Rwanda, took CAADP as the model and then modified it and expanded it to fit specific national and sub-national conditions.

Public Sector Investment and Expenditure
The rate of agricultural growth is determined by public sector investment and expenditure. The public sector determines if agriculture will grow rapidly or not. Many branches of government play an important role – not just the Ministry of Agriculture. Therefore, the Chief Executive (President) must explicitly provide leadership for accelerated agriculture growth, mobilizing all the relevant public sector institutions. Of course the benefits are economy wide, further justifying the highest level support.

Rural Infrastructure –Roads and Information
Improved technology cannot spread without a complex system of all weather rural roads and information infrastructure. This is the most expensive and most vital element of accelerated agricultural growth. Of course that infrastructure serves other critical roles – e.g. broad participation in growth, the educational system, women’s empowerment. Thus its cost is spread over much more than agriculture.

Countries that ignore rural infrastructure in effect leave the bulk of their population out of the growth and development process. They are oriented to the small urban sector. However, they ignore the rural sector partly in ignorance of the large role it plays. It is up to academics to explain that larger role that affects the urban sector in a substantial manner. Keep in mind the truism that the faster agriculture grows the faster its relative importance declines.

Ministries of Agriculture
Ministry’s of Agriculture have a broad set of functions that facilitate agricultural growth. But the core drivers of growth are research and extension of the research results to the small commercial farmers. The first call on the Ministry of Agricultures budget must be the substantial, adequate financing of these two elements.

Accelerated growth in agriculture requires increased productivity. Yields per acre must rise. That is because agriculture depends substantially on land as an input and the land area is fixed with normally little scope for increasing the land input for agriculture. Increased yields per acre must rise from technological change which in turn is the product of biological science based research and the technically sound extension that moves it into farm practice.

In practice the bulk of agricultural research and extension is provided by the public sector. How serious governments are about accelerated agricultural growth is best measured by the level of support for agriculture and specifically agricultural research and its associated agricultural extension programs.

In a carefully research effort CAADP estimated that serious attention to agriculture requires on the order of 10 percent of public expenditure directed explicitly to agriculture. Research and its extension must be the core of that expenditure.

The basis for accelerated agricultural growth is research. Agriculture is characterized by widely varying physical conditions to which the research system, must adapt. Research results must be specific to narrowly defined geographic areas. That means that a large country has little advantage over small countries on the level of research expenditure required. It must cover all the variable conditions.

That requires a central station and many regional stations. Small countries cannot rely significantly on spill over effects from neighboring large countries. All these requirements describe an expensive system. Commitment to accelerated agricultural growth requires commitment to a large, geographically and subject matter diverse system. And, as growth accelerates the requirements for sustained growth increase and the research extension system must expand apace.

A major side benefit to the required large research system is the importance of the research/extension staff in understanding and lobbyingfor public actions. The large well staffed research extension system becomes the major lobbying force for expenditure and hence growth of the agricultural sector.

Normally research has two institutional foci – a substantial input from institutions of higher education and direct action of government programs on specific geographic areas. Coordinating the two has efficiency advantages.

Effective, practical research requires a full set of research institutions from abstract theory based to highly applied. Each reinforces the other.

Extension
Extension grows naturally out of the research system. Ideally there is a continuum of personnel from the more abstract aspects of research to the highly applied to outreach or extension efforts. As a continuum the research and extension are closely integrated. That may be within subject matter departments or a parallel extension institution to the research institution.

Private sector extension systems may develop - for example by seed companies. They provide a useful supplement, not a substitute, to the public sector effort.

 Private Sector Input and output marketing
For several decades, rapid agricultural growth is characterized as a seed fertilizer revolution. Both grow rapidly from a low base to dominate the agricultural sector and its growth.

The seed system grows out of the public sector crop research system and hence their must be an explicit effort to privatize the seed system. Failure to do so will limit its growth due to the inadequacy of public sector resources to the immense task of a fully expanded system. Failure to privatize will lock in a too small public sector. Because of the large technical component to the sector privatization will require large scale training programs. The Gates Foundation has played an important role in developing essential Africa wide training programs as a basis for the required large scale privatization of national systems. Government oversight is important to rapid privatization.

Government also has an important oversight role with respect to growth of private sector fertilizer marketing on a large nationwide scale. It may play a continuing role in the import of fertilizer – ensuring a growing supply side push for growth of the sector.

The important role of government in the rapid growth of the private sector may make government domination attractive. The result will be constraining the growth of the sector and hence restraining agricultural growth. A bad outcome.

Local Level Implementation Institutions
Agricultural conditions vary greatly over relatively small areas. That requires strong local governments that have well staffed institutions focused on ensuring that research output is adapted to their local conditions. Staff of national level institutions must integrate and often must make up for deficiencies in these local institutions.

Why is Agricultural Modernization not proceeding More Broadly?
Only a few Sub-Saharan African countries, specifically Ethiopia, to some extent Rwanda, and for brief periods Ghana and Angola have succeeded in broad based agricultural growth. Sub-Saharan Africa is notable for the absence of that growth. Why? And how will that change?

The simple answer as to why is that African countries tend to have leadership that rises from the urban sector and focusses on that sector. Its political base is not in the rural areas. Sub-Saharan African countries typically have urban based political systems. The other side of that coin is that the small commercial farmers, the economic backbone of rural areas, are not organized into political bodies.

Ethiopia stands out because the leadership of the dominant party (for many of the formative years, Prime Minister Meles) spent years in rural based guerilla activity requiring support of the rural leadership (the small commercial farmer.) That led to understanding that supporting that rural leadership could provide a major source of support and stability to the national government. Prime Minister Meles thus made policies supportive of rapid agricultural growth central to the broader policy process. That continued beyond his death.

Ethiopia exemplifies each of the points made in the foregoing exposition.
Prime Minister Meles, clearly stated in numerous public fora the importance he attached to agriculture and the rural sector. That was also true of the number one economic advisor to the President. There was never any doubt as to the strength of the commitment. That greatly strengthened the hand of the Minister of Agriculture. The result was a well above six percent agricultural growth rate from 1993 on.

Although Ethiopian public expenditure directly in agriculture fell somewhat short of the ten percent CAADP target (a target also embraced in the Ethiopian planning documents) it was always clear that agriculture had a substantial priority in obtaining the funds deemed necessary to succeed. Agriculture was certainly not starved of funds.

Agricultural research in Ethiopia has been staffed and funded at a level that makes it the premier agricultural research institution in Sub-Saharan Africa. The system has turned out a steady stream of new varieties and practices that have been the backbone of the rapid agricultural growth. The most recent is a high yielding variety of teff that spread rapidly with a major production impact.

Extension workers are fully integrated with research and farmers. Extension workers organized farm groups with which they became fully integrated. As a result, a steady stream of research results were implemented providing the growth in yields that continues as central to the high growth rate.

There have been other success stories in Africa. Rwanda is very much in the pattern of Ethiopia and based on CAADP.

The Chief of State of Rwanda has consistently spoken of the importance of agriculture and supported the agricultural planning and implementation process. As for Ethiopia that process is soundly grounded in CAADP. The present, stable government has not been in power for as long a period as is the case for Ethiopia and hence the record is shorter, but the stage is set for continuous rapid growth.

Ghana exemplifies a shorter and geographically more constrained success. The tropical forest area had a ten-year period of rapid growth emphasizing tree crops and the export sector. It was a solid period of success based on national commitment but did not draw as fully as the other cases on CAADP and our now substantial knowledge of the conditions for success.

For the majority of contemporary African countries the academic community will have to develop the arguments, as in this paper, and present them to the political leadership. The basis is here for doing that.

Spread to Other Countries
There are signs that a substantial number of Sub-Saharan African countries are now considering an emphasis on agriculture. The time may be ripe for broad application of the large body of knowledge we now have about how to do it. The basis is in the detailed plan of action in CAADP and the highly successful and the now fully proven large favorable impact on growth and poverty reduction.

First must come explicit commitment to agricultural growth from the heads of state. They must understand the highly favorable impact on urbanization, income growth and poverty reduction The research community is now prepared to provide that understanding as the basis for the large resource requirements for obtaining the large economy wide benefits.

Future Needs
Only a small fraction of African countries are on the road to rapid agricultural growth and the consequent favorable effects on overall growth and poverty reduction. Two aspects of accelerated agricultural growth deserve emphasis – presumably by the African Union.

First, the fact that accelerated agricultural growth accelerates overall growth, accelerates the growth of the urban sector, and speeds poverty reduction. Accelerated agricultural growth is the fast route to economic transformation.

Second, while details differ from country to country, the broad outlines of how to achieve accelerated agricultural growth are known e.g. in CAADP, and in my books, and are ready to be implemented.