Future for SSA – 9

The SSA – 9 agricultural data confirmed what seems obvious: low-income agricultural countries are much more sensitive to international prices, their rural environment supported the majority of the entire population and different policies can improve gradually or deteriorate very quickly the agricultural business.

Hence, the speed the country is running at does not matter, the most important element is the path, which means that western institutions should evaluate SSA – 9 agriculture for its steps towards land tenure system, infrastructure investment etc., differently on the past were the financial aid was conditioned simply on market opening.

However, it is obvious that without a market opening domestic policies cannot resolve extreme rural poverty, because these countries are living one demographic phase with strong rate birth and they do not have the money to resolve rural and urban problems for the next two decades.

Thus, doing the right choices is the most important phase for SSA – 9 governments, by assessing what crops have advantages in the international market, how to unburden agricultural chains and modernize the domestic market.

175 In other words, for some tropical commodities like cocoa, coffee, tea, tobacco, sugar cane and so on, it is advisable to build the route to the real free market, while for international commodities such as maize, soy beans, rice, wheat and so on, it is prudent to look for inner factors that threat local farmers and to withdraw charges as soon as possible, or whether or when it is possible.

Finally, modernizing domestic market would mean to exploit, in the future, the good geographic position and export fruits and vegetable to European and Asian market.

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8 CONCLUSIONS

Very different from the current days, where agricultural prices are highlighted around the world combined with alleged collateral effects as hunger and malnutrition, our research picked up a time series where agricultural business was ostracized. Between 1990 and 2005 was possible to analyze the begging of agriculture globalization, the international prices was stabled at low level and contemporaneously it was happening the most severe level of the extreme poverty of the SSA history, around 64,6 percent of rural population was living below poverty line, nowadays this level is around 47,5 percent.

The literature said that rural poverty in SSA would be resolved through agriculture. It had not occurred because during 1990s the productivity was very low and the linkage between farmers and non-farmers business had not happened, thus without this process the rural poverty had not decreased. We seek to assess why this scenario remained.

The first assertion is that we cannot look for only one answer to resolve rural poverty, find out a panacea for all SSA would be a “work of Hercules”. The countries should be divided by profiles as GDP per capita, the dependences of mineral and agriculture resources.

Secondly, the agriculture in SSA is influenced by immeasurable factors interconnected, from the bad weather condition to the international aid coming from a SMS of a Norwegian citizen. Therefore the model is limited only to implications of local factors that can be managed, endogenous and exogenous factors with narrow relationship with agriculture.

Following this limits, we saw that the agricultural countries with low-income had diverse performances in poverty reduction between 1990 and 2005, and agricultural growth had a weak link with poverty reduction.

The agricultural environment gears are more complex that this simplistic assumption;

poverty reduction showed sensitive to many other factors in a country as land tenure system or property rights (PR), infrastructure, rural density population, access to credit, mobility of GDP share and so on.

177 Moreover, a country as good macroeconomic performance could hide many inner problems; Ghana’s case of poverty trap brought up to us three affirmations, which agro-ecological zones have a great weight in developing countries, to increase of productivity not means income growth, and high birth rate combined with low infrastructure level avoid the poverty reduction.

Thus, the new model showed fit to use in low-income agricultural countries, but the empirical results showed that exist an hierarchy of priority that whether respected optimizes the agriculture linkages and consequently improves the process of poverty reduction.

Property rights or land tenure (PR) together with political stability (PS) always started or destroyed the progression of the rural poverty reduction. The different trends of poverty reduction between two countries with the same level of PR and PS happen on behalf of some gears.

Firstly the time factor, meaning how long this level of PR or PS is being maintained Secondly, whether the macroeconomic data, mainly the credit system (DCPS), is following the improvement of education level (HCPRI)

Thirdly how is the infrastructure installed and in which path is it going? Is it sufficient to support the density of rural population?

As much better are the answers, more efficient is the country in reducing the poverty.

This hierarchy explain the dichotomy of results and an apparent dilemma between education level and poverty reduction in SSA, it happened because, the insistent aim of international aid in improve education levels but at the same time forgetting to assess the socio-economic environment context created the so called “education dilemma in SSA”. We considering that this mistake created an artificial stress to education level and it will continue not helping the poverty reduction.