International economics and global politics are unfamiliar territory for many. However, the operations of institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (I.M.F.) have profound impacts upon the countries with which they treat, and these extend beyond financial issues and geo-politics. This article indicates how the I.M.F. has imposed ‘conditionalities’ in sub-Saharan Africa as integral elements of Structural Adjustment Programmes (S.A.P.s) that affect not only the lives of all the inhabitants, but also the nature and landscapes of the nations concerned — their very geographical composition.
Periodic marketing systems were absent from southwestern West Africa in precolonial times because of the lack of significant interregional trade, generally low levels of suprasubsistence production, and unstable political and economic conditions. Trade was stimulated during the colonial period, but it was largely preempted by nonindigenous entrepreneurs, and it was channeled through the nascent urban hierarchy rather than through indigenous periodic markets. The existing system has been unable to meet the increased recent demand for foodstuffs, and a new system of indigenous periodic rural market places has emerged. KEY WORDS Origin conditions, Periodic markets, Sierra Leone.RADE and marketing were conducted T throughout much of precolonial West Africa by a system of permanent and periodic markets; the notion that pre-European West Africa was a pure subsistence economy is simply not true.' Although trade was low in volume, sporadic at times, and often disrupted, it was significant enough to integrate quite disparate economies and societies, and to support a small but important segment of the population. This trade was conducted largely in market places, which formed an integrated system of mobile and fixed nodes extending over most of West Africa.2 Through this system, local foodstuffs . cit., footnote 2. 5 Original expositions of the basic notion that periodic markets behave as central places in which the threshold requirements for the provisioning of goods and services exceed the range over which the market can attract a clientele are found in
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