Read at :
http://www.africanagricultureblog.com/2011/05/burkina-fasos-farming-miracle.html
Burkina Faso’s farming miracle
by Duncan Green
Just been reading ‘Helping Africa to Feed Itself: Promoting Agriculture to Reduce Poverty and Hunger’, a paper by Steve Wiggins and Henri Leturque, both of the ODI. It’s a brilliant and to my mind, very fair overview, with one of its main messages being that regional generalizations about Africa are usually misleading – some subregions of Africa (eg West and North) have actually done very well in producing food and feeding their populations (not always the same thing), while others (e.g. southern Africa) have bombed. One box particularly jumped out – on the extraordinary success of Burkina Faso.
“The statistics are remarkable. Since the early 1960s output in cereals in Burkina has grown at an annual average of 3.5% a year, well ahead of population growth, a rate that matches that of Vietnam (see chart).
(continued)
