Explaining the Failure in Agricultural production in subSaharan Africa

This paper examines changes in agricultural productivity in 10 Subsaharan countries. The relative performance of agricultural sector was gauged using data envelopment analysis. From a panel data set of the 10 countries which included the 28-year period 1972-1999, mathematical programming methods were used to measure Malmquist indexes of total factor productivity. It was found that, during that period, total factor productivity have experienced a negative evolution in sample countries. A decomposition of those measures suggest that, most of the weak performance of factors productivity is attributable more to technological change than technical efficiency change. French-speaking countries better succeeded to raise their productivity than English-speaking countries do. In addition, it have been found that Sahelian countries failed to rise their agricultural productivity compared to forest countries where a positive evolution have been detected