Linguistic evidence strongly suggests that maize penetrated the interior of tropical Africa from the coastal regions, but the timing and mode of its introduction cannot be established. The commonly repeated assertion that the Portuguese brought maize to tropical Africa from the New World cannot be documented at this juncture, although they seem certainly to have had economic motives for doing so.Maize was probably introduced to tropical Africa at more than one point and at different times. Maize was widely grown along the coast from the River Gambia to Sâo Tomé, around the mouth of the River Congo, and possibly in Ethiopia, in the sixteenth century. There is reference to it in all these places, in Zanzibar, and around the mouth of the River Ruvuma in the seventeenth century; and it was not only mentioned but described as an important foodstuff and a major provision for slave ships between Liberia and the Niger Delta during the same century.Much less information is available for the interior, but it clearly seems to have been unknown in Uganda as late as 1861. Until well within the present century, it was neither a major export nor a mainstay of the diet in most of eastern and central tropical Africa, the bulk of the areas where it is now of major importance.
This article argues that the concept of “subsistence agriculture”—widely encountered and long used in the literature—is not meaningful enough to be analytically useful as usually employed and should be abandoned. Particularly important for policy is the fact that use of the term “subsistence agriculture” leads to implicitly treating all small‐scale agriculture as a homogeneous residual made up of producers who vary little in their potential contribution to economic development. Data are presented which strongly suggest that small‐scale agriculture in less‐developed countries is not homogeneous so far as decision‐making situations are concerned. The second half of the article considers development of an alternative set of criteria for classifying small‐scale farmers that would reflect meaningful differences in decision‐making experience and decision‐making situations. A tentative set of such criteria for which data are now available, or could be developed with relative ease, are presented to illustrate the relevance of such a classification for development planning and policy.
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