This policy arena is made up of four papers from the Economic and Social Research Council Development Economics Study Group 1997 annual conference, which all address aspects of agricultural development in Africa. The policy arena may be viewed as an update and extension of a review of the state of African agriculture that appeared in the ODI-IDS publication Insights for Policymakers, Number 16, September 1995. In that issue, Johnathan Kydd summarized contributions by Paul Mosley, Colin Thirtle and Steve Wiggins, under the title `African farming crisis overstated?'. The three papers all suggested that the dire state of African agriculture had been overstated and that there were signs of recovery. Wiggins (1995), in this journal, analysed 14 case studies from 6 countries and found that there was little evidence of decline and much of increased production per head, albeit by modest margins. In 11 out of 14 cases, farm production had increased while rural per capita production increased in 8 of the cases. Mosley's study of Kenya, Malawi and Zimbabwe used econometric estimates to show that innovation was policy induced, a point which is also apparent in Thirtle's contribution on Zimbabwe and South Africa.
Investigations using national aggregate statistics, which are far removed from the village-level case studies, also give encouraging results. Pardey et al. (1995) show that since 1961, labour productivity in African agriculture grew at an average 0.5 per cent annually. The corresponding rate of growth in land productivity was 2.2 per cent, for the sector as a whole, and 1.7 per cent for land under crops. Agricultural productivity measures based on wheat units, as opposed to the standard output aggregates based on agricultural value added, reveal a recovery of agricultural productivity growth during the mid 1980's (Block, 1994). Similarly, a study of agricultural growth in 22 countries of Sub-Saharan Africa (Thirtle et al., 1995), used pooled data to construct Malmquist total factor productivity (TFP) indices, which revealed that negative growth was the exception. In only 23 per cent of cases was TFP growth negative, whereas it was between zero and one percent for 36 per cent of the countries,