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Industrialization and the agricultural revolution

If the African continent as a whole has not yet embarked upon the agricultural revolution, neither has it yet entered the industrial age. Agricultural stagnation is not the consequence of forced industrialization, as the World Bank argues against all the evidence, but the corollary of a no less marked industrial stagnation.¹²

Only six African countries (South Africa, Zimbabwe, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco) have an infrastructure that can be described as industrialized. In the continent as a whole industry employs fewer than 10% of the active population, and thus remains below the threshold from which it is possible to speak of a secondary production sector. Except for the six countries indicated there are insufficient manufacturing units to constitute an industrial network: the matrix of inter-industrial exchange is still almost blank.

Furthermore, industrial output is still essentially from the extractive sector. In this respect Africa has a virtual monopoly (more than 70% of world production) of gold, diamonds and cobalt, and is a major supplier of copper, bauxite, phosphates, uranium, ferrous metals and oil. Even when the world market share is limited, it is possible to speak of 'mining economies' in terms of production value in relation to population of the countries concerned and its contribution to the state's revenue. In global strategies Africa is above all 'e storehouse of natural resources' rather than either the locus or the outlet for capital deployment. Over the past 25 years, exploitation of these natural resources has been growing rapidly: oil production has shown a twenty-fold increase, that of ferrous metals five-fold, and that of bauxite by two and a half times.

Basic industries (steel, chemicals, engineering) are non-existent in most African countries and where they do exist reduced to small-scale unintegrated operations. The obstacles are well known and there is no sign of their being overcome in the foreseeable future: shortcomings in financial resources and home markets, extreme technological dependence even for processes that are quite routine elsewhere. Regional co-operation on markets or financing (that might have been expected from some oil-producing and minerals-exporting countries with financial surpluses) has to date been abortive.

The few industrial units that do exist are virtually all concentrated in the light industrial sector (mainly textiles and food processing) either to give added value to agricultural exports, or more usually for import substitution, which finds its main market among the middle or higher income groups, who rarely form more than 10% of the population. In these circumstances the 'industrial redeployment' that was keenly discussed in the 1970s has not touched the continent, and the establishment of export manufacturing industries (on the model of some newly industrializing countries of Asia and Latin America) has not begun. Among the many obstacles it should be noted that if unskilled manpower is abundant and cheap, the proletarian milieu is still embryonic, and recruitment, even at subordinate level, costly and inefficient.

Industry as a whole is almost entirely under the direct control of foreign capital. This is the case almost without exception in the continent's French-speaking countries and, despite the apparently more significant association of local interests, almost the same in the English-speaking countries. Some North African countries, and South Africa obviously, are exceptions to the rule.

Elsewhere foreign monopoly generally prolongs that of the interests of the old French and British colonial trade, while there is limited penetration by North American and Japanese multinationals.

The industrial units generally enjoy a monopoly status in the countries where they operate, and a single plant is usually sufficient to meet all the demand. Under this monopoly protection with state backing (for example, tax concessions) these units are not much concerned with international competitiveness and, whether privately or publicly owned, do not usually display an efficient modern capitalist management. If the door is opened to competing imports they almost always go bankrupt and are closed down.

Despite this starting point, that is far and away the lowest on the world scale, the rates of industrial growth - even at record level in this or that instance have remained astonishingly low and never higher than 4% a year over the decade, or of the order of half the growth rate of the potentially active urban population. Industrialization has never triggered overall growth, but always fed on that of other sectors and been encouraged by them.

It is impossible to review all the experiences of development in Africa in their varied forms. No more is it our intention to reduce them all to a single undifferentiated model. While observing the contrasts and differences and giving them more heed than their common denominator, it is possible to recall that over this vast continent, imbued with varying social options and countless political somersaults, there have been at least four kinds of experience:

(a) Cases of 'stagnation' (in terms of growth) associated with poverty of natural resources, not necessarily absolute but in terms of the demands of the world system.

(b) Cases of 'stagnation' despite the existence of such resources whether untapped (but known), or tapped (sometimes on a large scale).

(c) Cases of relatively marked (or even strong) 'growth' associated with the tapping of these resources, whether by multinationals, or the national state.

(d) Cases of 'marked growth' despise the fact that the tapped resources (often agricultural rather than mineral) are 'medium-scare', thanks in general to a broad opening-up to the outside world, and where this marked growth is associated with a more or less unequal distribution of its benefits.

These experiences may also be classified on a political scale:

(i) assertion of the aim of national independence, sometimes (or often) with a 'socialist' objective; effective related measures, at the level of state intervention at least (nationalizations, occasional land reform, co-operative systems, formal control over external relations, and so on); linked (and not by chance) with general statements (on the world situation, for example) and obvious international alliances: or (ii) assertion of an apparently neutral aim of 'development first' with an appeal to (mainly Western) capital: refusal to 'condemn' the principles of capitalism, private initiative and the world strategy of the multinationals and the Western states, and so forth.

Within this formal classification, it is easy to draw further distinctions by following the conventional analysis of 'economic performance':

1) Activities triggering effective growth when this has occurred: (a) oil and mining in the first place; (b) export agriculture (fairly rich: coffee, cocoa; or poor: groundnuts): (c) light consumer industries reasonably managed, established by the multinationals or the state, using modern techniques, responsive to the home market (import substitution); (d) an active construction sector linked to accelerated urbanization end 'prosperity'; (e) administrative expenditure conceived in classic terms mimicking the West in form with varying degrees of supposedly 'social' purposes (principally education) and always rapidly increasing; (f) tertiary activities (trade, finance) nearly always showing more active growth than the other sectors. When overall growth has been weak, nil, or negative, the explanation is usually insufficient dynamism in (a) and (b) and/or the dubious character of (e). If, moreover, there has been strong pressure for (d) and (e) then the inescapable dual crisis of public expenditure and balance of payments aggravates the situation. The want of dynamism in (a). (b) and (c) is blamed primarily on the country's objective poverty, and secondarily on its rare and suspicious 'rationalism' in rejecting foreign capital. This is or can be aggravated by the lack of concern of the 'elite', its 'corruption', 'demagogy' and so on.

2) Agriculture always backward, undeveloped and nearly always stagnant or virtually stagnant (except perhaps in the export crops sector) and therefore incapable of releasing a surplus of marketed foodstuffs to meet the relevant urban demand. In the saddest cases, the rural community has increasing difficulty in feeding itself and famine takes hold. In the more favourable cases, the statistics record a positive performance in per capita food production (but rarely more than 2% to 3% a year over a long span of the country's overall production), an increasing marketable surplus but usually insufficient to meet the relevant urban demand, which in truth easily grows at a rate of 4% to 5% a year. It is easy to blame these disasters or shortcomings on the climate (drought) or on the administrative bureaucracy unconcerned with the rural community. It is rare for a study to be made of the policies of exaction from the rural community (the terms of trade between town and countryside...).

3) An industrial capacity that never triggers growth but is largely the result of adjustment to it, whose spin-off is slight: (a) upstream by the scarcity of basic industry and the low level of inter-industrial integration; (b) downstream, by the limited amount of income it distributes. Three details must be added: (i) if the industry takes the form of a defined number of production units with a virtual monopoly over a small market and these units supply consumer goods, such industry (even if efficiently managed, namely without requiring subsidy for prices competitive with those of imports) is adrift and not a driving force; (ii) if the state interferes too much in the desire to control this kind of industry, it does so badly (in the African experience) and must then subsidize the industry; (iii) some countries try to go further. They proclaim their desire to make industry the main driving force of the economy. Priority is given to the machine tools industry in national, integrated 'industrializing industries' in order to 'catch up with' the developed world. The question then is whether this last significant detail gives the African experiences concerned a qualitative difference from the others. This fundamental issue is, in our opinion, rarely tackled.

As well as the apparent short-term economic performances, taking in the political factor, two kinds of experience in Africa can be identified. One: those that have not challenged the fundamental external driving force and have been satisfied with exploiting their international 'comparative advantage' in agriculture and mining and, hinged to these sectors, the growth of their import substitution light industries, services and administration. They are the 'national' and 'nationalist' versions - where the state is expected to control the more or less significant sectors of growth through its public ownership; and the 'social' or 'socialist' versions. But since the fruits of growth are appropriated by between 1% and 15% of the population, these modalities do not contradict the extroverted characer of development. This development, described as 'neocolonial', warrants the name in so far as it continues colonial exploitation and is satisfied to associate with it a local elite. There is no doubt that this kind of development has been possible in some instances. But it has been objectively impossible in some neighbouring countries, where the latter were for example the suppliers of cheap manpower to the former (for example, Burkina Faso in relation to Côte d'Ivoire), or deprived of some driving export role less by nature than by the pattern of world demand.

Two: those that have sought to challenge the external driving force. As the fruit of a political and social history of the national liberation movement and the association of the mass of the people with this movement, these experiences have tried to be national. But if we look further than the intentions, it seems that these experiences (a score or so during the two decades of independence) have been unable to begin implementing an integrated national economic system with any fair degree of autonomy. The only experience that went very far in this direction (Nasser's Egypt) was overthrown by a conjuncture of its shortcomings and the West's hostility. Did the second serious experience (Algeria's), despite favourable financial factors, not come up against the same internal and external obstacles? Are not the intentions of some others (Nigeria above all) a form of words so far? To take, for example steel - one of the bases for autonomous development - it must be observed that there is no steel mill in Africa outside Eygpt and Algeria, whose autonomy not only in formal ownership but also in outlets has been established. Elsewhere steel, most frequently a continuation of colonial trade in building materials, is bound to largely luxury building needs and not to machine tools. Tunisia's attempt to copy Egypt and Algeria has been limited by the country's small market, its political options and illusions (tourism!). Nigeria's attempts warrant a closer look, for de-industrialization of the country by the penetration of multinationals (which destroy the country's small and medium size enterprises and steer national capital into trade and speculation) comes into objective conflict with the national options in official statements.

The second kind of experience and the only one of interest from the point of view of the autocentric alternative may well be described as 'national' (in reality or intention) but scarcely as 'popular'. The national industrialization envisaged would not in the first instance improve the standards of living of the poorest sections (and hence be geared to their genuine rather than money demand), but relate to the growing demand of the middle classes. The 'backwardness' of agriculture is no accident, since the demand for basic foodstuffs is of more concern to the mass of the poor than to those middle classes. So speculative agriculture (in fruit, vegetables, meat for the better-off) is given preference over the basic crops (cereals): Egypt is a fine example with the encouragement of Arab and international capital in this direction.

The consumption pattern of the middle classes, the Western model, absorbs all the so-called 'scarce' resources: (local and foreign) capital and skilled manpower. Our assessment of the use of the latter in the Arab world has brought us to the conclusion that three-quarters of this scarce resource (the stock of workers with secondary, technical or higher education, in this instance) was directly or indirectly engaged on output intended for the super-consumption of the better-off. Obviously the system of production corresponding to this option entails total technological dependence. The apparently common sense - theory that the cake must be made bigger before it can be shared out is a nonsense. Nobody builds motorways (for the needs of motor vehicle owners) to later apportion them by the yard to the beggars. The share-out determines the character of the cake rather than its size.

If the experiences in question remain extraverted - manifestly in the first instances, and after a closer consideration of their content in the second - it is because they are not 'popular' in the sense shown here ('development for whom?').

The final characteristic, common to both sets of examples, is respect for the sacrosanct principle of 'profitability'. If this criteria is regarded as decisive (even with occasional relaxations) if it is based (as indeed it is) on the system of world prices (reflecting the international division of labour, the sharing out of the market among the monopolies, and so on), the criteria can lead only to the option of the extraverted strategy. Neither political discourse nor diplomatic alliances can affect the meaning of this option.

The history of the past three decades for Africa can be described as the history of the failure of the so-called 'modernization' strategies (cf. Chapter 2).

When the majority of the African countries attained independence, the prevailing view, even in Africa, attributed the continent's underdevelopment to a historical backwardness that must 'catch up' by the simple expedient of going flat out in a previously determined and defined direction. What the national liberation movement blamed the settlers for was for being unequal to the task. The African 'right' and 'left' were convinced that independence was the guarantee and sufficient condition for the acceleration of the rate of 'modernization'. The liberal thesis argued that the maintenance of a wide open door to integration in the international division of labour and appeal to the 'scarce resource' - foreign capital - was not incompatible with the acceleration of growth, but the reverse. The state's role was precisely that of creating the most favourable conditions to create new outlets for capital, by speeding up education and training neglected by the settlers, and by modernizing infrastructure and administration. The socialist thesis of the time, spurning foreign capital, argued that it was the state's duty to bridge the gap of the shortage of capital for the precise purpose of accelerating the process of modernization. In other words, the socialist thesis rejected neither the prospect of modernization, nor that of integration in the international division of labour.

The same fundamental views on the 'neutrality of technology' is common to these two theses, that argue that the direction of modernization was knowable and known: it is enough to look at the advanced 'western' societies, in the West and in the East, to recognize the similarity of many of the aims - of consumption, and of methods -organization of production, administration and education. Doubtless the 'socialists' were far more sensitive to the issue of national independence and therefore on their guard as to the appeal to foreign capital. Doubtless, too, they were more sensitive to the issues of income distribution and priority to public sector services. But the 'liberals' retorted that capitalism would also solve these problems and in addition engender a gradual democratization of social and political life.

Both theses in the final analysis arose from the same Western-centred and technically economistic view, as the common denominator of a vulgarized Marxism and the finer points of conventional social science. Protests, some IS years ago, were uncommon and poorly received - peasant utopias, culturalist nationalisms - and it is true that for want of sufficiently broad backing the protesters sank into these eccentricities. But why should Africa be singled out for such fantasies?

The actual history of these two decades has had the effect that both theses are nowadays the subject of systematic questioning to which we shall return (cf. (Chapters 5 and 6).

An example of a superficial and truncated analysis of African reality: the World Bank report 'accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa'.

The 'experts' love to brag of their 'political neutrality'. They pride themselves on the hidden defect of many economists desirous of being technocrats, capable of mentally shaping a 'good development policy', 'scientific', 'devoid of any ideological prejudice'. But this kind of exercise has the supreme virtue of avoiding the real options facing currently existing societies. The truncated and superficial image of reality characteristic of the genre under discussion must of necessity lead to false conclusions.

The World Bank report entitled 'accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa' is a fine example of this substitution of Technical prescriptions' for analysis of the causes and roots of the failure of African development.¹³

After the initial acknowledgement of the fact of the severe economic backwardness of Africa in recent decades, the World Bank might have been expected to offer an in-depth critique of the local social and economic systems and world system of division of labour responsible for the failure. Some kind of self-criticism too might have been expected of the World Bank, which for 20 years has supported most of the fundamental guidelines of the development under challenge. Not in the least; the World Bank blames the failure entirely on the African governments that had spurned agriculture and given industry too high a priority! As if a rate of growth of 3.3% on a virtually nil base in 1960, and equaling only half the urban growth rate and only just above the demographic growth rate, indicated some madcap industrialization {especially as Africa's share in world industry declined). Oddly enough and against all expectation, the World Bank attributed this 'bias against agriculture' to a prejudice on the part of foreign aid and the 'development theory'. We are on the contrary conscious of the colonial prejudice of the 'exclusively agricultural and mining role' of the African continent.

The strategy proposed by the Bank is perfectly summarized in page 4 of the report:

The internal 'structural' problems and the external factors impeding African economic growth have been exacerbated by domestic policy inadequacies... trade and exchange-rate policies have overprotected industry, held back agriculture... public sectors frequently become overextended...

After which the Bank suggests a strategy of readjustment to the demands of the world system based on priority for agricultural and mining exports, by the principal method of devaluation and the restoration of a greater liberalism, combined with greater openness to private enterprise. The carrot of doubling foreign aid in real terms in the 1980s is held out to make these principles acceptable. As is known nowadays, the 'readjustments is imposed but foreign aid declines!

If the words have any meaning this is an extraverted strategy of adjustment to the demands of transnationalization, a strategy of renouncing the construction of a diversified national and regional economy capable through its dynamism of becoming a genuine partner in the interdependent world system.

The analysis of the internal and external constraints is especially disturbing. The chapter on basic constraints notes: underdeveloped human resources, low productivity of agriculture and rapid urbanization.

The rationale for underdevelopment of human resources is trivialized to inadequate education. Infantile illusions are taken up in the chapter on human resources, treated as an area of substantial returns, without the authors of the report realizing that they are measuring these returns by the tautological indicator based on a comparison of rewards between graduates and illiterate! Education (in its present form) is not necessarily the best investment, but is definitely a means of differentiating classes and incomes... With no consideration of the society's problems, with no changes to suggest, the report is satisfied with proposing some minor tinkering to reduce (very slightly) the costs of education in its present form.

The low productivity of agriculture in Africa is a platitude. What the Bank report neglects to point out is that this low productivity accompanying the extensive pattern of this agriculture has been and is profitable from the point of view of the world system's division of labour. In effect it allows the West to acquire raw materials without having to invest. Transition to intensive agriculture, a necessity of today, entails a rise in the world prices of these raw materials if they are to be exported: land, along with oil or water, is no longer 'limitless' but becoming a scarce resource.

The growth of urbanization is likewise a platitude. What the Bank does not point out is that the rural exodus is the result of the impoverishment of the countryside and that it cannot be held back unless there is a transition to intensive agriculture requiring, in turn, industrial backing and fair prices (not only the internal prices but the world prices too if the output of this agriculture is to be exported). What the Bank further fails to point out is that an inadequate industrial growth (of 3.3% a year) can obviously not absorb the urban growth. The Bank's talk of deterioration in the services essential to urban life and the proposals for tinkering to reduce costs here are in these circumstances nothing but empty talk of pie in the sky.

The external factors are also treated superficially without analysis as to their causes. Noting the worsening in the balance of payments of the oil-importing countries in the region is no analysis of the problem but only a proclamation. The Bank's analysis stops short at the observation that the growth in quantity of exports has been insufficient and low: from 7.2% annual growth in the 1960s to 2% for the following decade in respect of mining output (excluding oil) and from 4.6 to 0.7% in respect of agricultural output. It offers no information as to the causes of these low figures: the world crisis in demand, the encouragement of over-production in the Third World (the Bank itself advises each country to diversify by producing what it advises for the neighbour), the aims and strategies of the multinationals in the mining sector ('shelving' of reserves) the crisis in expansion of extensive agriculture.

The critical analysis of the policies under way and consequently of the priorities proposed are governed by this disturbing vision of the global operation of the system and the 'fundamentalist' prejudices of the World Bank's Reaganite liberalism. The Bank has found only three ills afflicting Africa: (i) overvalued exchange rates; (ii) excessive taxation of farmers; and (iii) excessive growth in administrative expenditure.

It is obvious that if foreign exchange prices are maintained, devaluation allows the exporter to acquire more in local currency. But it does not permit the inference that devaluation must allow a balance without controls on the balance of payments, nor that foreign exchange prices will remain steady. Third World experience has shown repeatedly that local prices as a whole tend to adjust to those of imports, and by the same token the effects of devaluation on the structure of comparative prices and on the balance of payments are cancelled out. The absence of an autocentric economic structure with its own autonomy explains this widespread contagion reflecting the dependence of local prices on the world system of prices. How we put it is that the worldwide law of value governs the range of 'paranational' prices systems. If the per capita added value in agriculture of Third World countries is one third of the per capita added value in industry and services and if this is the case throughout the Third World, as opposed to what it is in the countries of the capitalist centre, it is for this fundamental reason. The real values of the rewards for labour determine prices and not the converse. A devaluation intended to raise real rewards (for all coffee producers for example) would not fail in its purpose: the dollar price of coffee would go down to adjust to the maintenance of the existing real (and minimal) rewards to the producers. This is the lesson of history that the World Bank grandly overlooks.

This fundamental reality obviously will not preclude the currencies of a group of countries being over-valued (or under-valued) in the world system. But there must be precision as to the character of the balances modified by juggling with exchange rates and a specific explanation of this character in case studies. It is doubtful if a general devaluation in Africa would improve the lot of the peasants and open the way for an upsurge in agricultural exports. Mali, Zaire and many others devalued without the slightest benefit accruing to the peasants.

It is correct that the hidden 'taxation' to which peasants in Africa are subjected (through the difference between the export price - after deduction of the real costs of internal marketing - and the price paid to the producer) is substantial: 40-50% according to the Bank's report. But where would the state find its resources if this margin were eliminated and if the country accorded priority in development to these export products, as the Bank suggests? Why not reduce the taxes on consumption (on coffee for example) in the developed countries for the benefit of the African peasant? It is clear that this taxation is a manifestation of the 'an/i-peasant' bias of the states. But the bias is a result of the character of the relations between these states and the world system: the anti-peasant bias is not only characteristic of the local state, but also of the global system of exploitation of which that state is part.

On the subject of public expenditure, as on others, the World Bank, by neglecting to go deep into an analysis of the system is bound to throw around advice of little value, to suggest 'tinkering' methods to bring a (trifling) reduction in this expenditure. Without fail, the savings will be made on the backs of the impoverished masses, in contradiction with the talk of 'basic needs'. Furthermore does not the IMF, the Bank's close associate, always insist that devaluation should be accompanied by austerity and reductions in the standards of living of the poorest strata? 'True pricing' (wish that of the world system taken as the ultimate standard) and the withdrawal of subsidies on the most essential items are always contrary to the interests of the population.

Industry, lightly discussed in chapter 7 of the report is, according to the Bank, 'over-protected'. Would not a relaxation of this 'over-protection' of an industry that remains the weakest in the world further weaken its already derisory growth rate? Wages in Africa are said to be 'high', and the lower rates of Bangladesh offered as a model. Is the World Bank seeing a Bangladeshization of the Third World? How is such language to be harmonized with the talk of satisfying 'basic deeds'? Industrialization strategy is not discussed: import substitution is regarded as the desirable option par excellence (what is forgotten is that the strategy reproduces and intensifies inequalities of income distribution), but 'badly implemented' in Africa since it requires too much state protection - without which, notwithstanding the Bank's pious remarks about 'entrepreneur-ship', the rate of industrialization would have been even lower. The Bank also recommends increasing local processing of mineral exports, although this is known to have swallowed up substantial capital without relating the exploitation of these resources to national development. It also recommends light industrial manufacture for export: have they forgotten the frustrations of the Moroccan and Tunisian textiles industries, which after a similar 'recommendation' found doors in the West slammed against them? As for the industrialization required for agricultural development, this is apparently a strategy unknown to the Bank. In regard to exploitation of mining resources, the Bank sees no other option than that of entrusting it to the interests and strategies of the multinationals. The notion that these resources could form the basis of national and regional development never surfaces.

The 'longer-term issues' are reduced to demography and its effects. It is a commonplace that the towns, where there is a fourfold population increase every quarter century, tend - by virtue of inadequate industrialization - to turn into slum shanty-towns. It is a commonplace that in 20 years the urban population will have increased by 50%. All the more reason, with a reminder of the need to conserve soils (how? the Bank does not tell us), for hastening intensive agricultural development and the consequent demand for industrial backing and delinking.

External assistance, a topic on which the Bank concludes its report with a further flurry of pious hopes, is incapable of being the palliative to the shortcomings of the proposed plan. According to the Bank's own calculations on the most encouraging hypothesis of 'substantial aid increase', this could in the 1980s provide the continent with no better than a 2.1% per capita annual growth rate. Such aid would take the debt service burden from 10% of export earnings in 1980 to 20% in 1990. None of these assessments have stood the test of time. The 'aid' in question has not come; and the debt burden has soared far beyond the calculations of our Washington technocrats.

The World Bank's language does not conform to the basic criteria of scientific analysis. It is a language of ideology in the worst sense of the term.

Notes

1. Statistical data are taken from reports of the World Bank in Washington and the Economic Commission for Africa in Addis Ababa. See also: Amin, Samir, Neocolonialism in West Africa. London. Penguin. 1973; A min. Samir and Coquery-Vidrovitch, Histoire économique du Congo 1880-1968, Paris, Anthropos. 1969; Amin, Samir, Impérialisme et sous-développement en Afrique, (new edition) Paris Economica, 1988; Amin, Samir, L'échange inégal et la loi de la valeur, (new edition) Paris. Economical 1988.

2. Gakou. Mohamed Lamine. The Crisis in African Agriculture, London. Zed. 1988: Aït Amara, Hamid and Founou-Tchuigoua, (eds), Etudes sur la crise des politiques de modernisation en Afrique, in preparation, and Samir Amin's forewords to these books. Cf. Amin, Samir. 'Les limites de la révolution verse', CERES, Vol.3, No.4, July 1970, and 'Le paradoxe africain le deficit alimentaire de l'Afrique'. CERES, No. 25, 1973.

3. Boserup, Ester, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth, London, Allen & Unwin, 1965.

4. Dumont. René, False Start in Africa. London. Deutsch. 1966.

5. BRGM, Les eaux souterraines de l'Afrique Sahèlienne. Paris. 1975,

6. Founou-Tchuigoua, Bernard, Les fondements de l'economies de traite au Sénégal, Genoble. Silex, 1981, and preface by Samir Amin. Cf. Amin, Samir. 'Underdevelopment and dependence in Black Africa', The Journal of Modern Africa Studies. Vol. 10. No.4, 172, pp.503-24: 'The Class Struggle in Africa', Revolution. No. 9, 1964, pp. 23 47; introduction to Amin, Samir, (ed) Modern Migrations in Western Africa, Oxford. Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1974.

7. Amin, Samir, 'Le développement du capitalisme en Afrique noire', L'Homme et la Société, No. 12, 1969.

8. See thesis in preparation by Jean Pierre Leclerc and contributions on China to the MSH-State University of New York Colloquium. Paris, June 1988.

9. Data from reports of the Economic Commission for Africa, Economic Commission for Western Asia, World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and the integrated economic reports (in Arabic) of the Arab League. Cf. Amin, Samir and Yaçhir, Faysal. La Médirerranée dans le système mondial, Paris, La Découverte, 1988. (English edition, The Mediterranean Between Autonomy and Dependency. London, Zed Books, 1989); Riad. Hassan [Amin. Samir], L'Egypte nasserienne. Paris, Minuit, 1964); Amin, Samir, The Arab Nation, London, Zed Press, 1978; The Arab Economy Today. London. Zed Books, 1982 Samir Amin's preface to Sertel, Yildiz, Nord-Sud: crise et immigration; le cas turc, Paris, Publisud, 1987; Keyder Caglar, State and Class in Turkey. London. Verso. 1987.

10. Amin, Samir, The Maghreb in the Modern World (Trans, by Michael Perl), London, Penguin, 1970, p. 104.

11. Amin, Samir, 'Pour une stratégie alternative du développement, à propos du CILSS'. African Development, No. 3, 1981, and Samir Amin's introduction to Aït Amara, Hamid and Founou-Tchuigoua, Bernard (eds) Etudes sur la crise des politiques de modernisation en Afrique.

12. Amin, Samir, Faire, Alexandre, and Malkin, Daniel, L'avenir industrial de l'Afrique, Paris. Harmattan. 1981; various authors for UNU, Crise des politiques d'industrialisation en Afrique. (in preparation): Amin. Samir. 'L'économie politique de l'Afrique dans la crise contemporaine' in Bourges, H, and Wauthier. C.. Les 50 Afriques, Paris, Seuil, 1979; Yachir, Faysal, Mining in Africa Today: Strategies and Prospects, London, Zed Books, 1988; The World Steel Industry Today, London, Zed Books. 1988.

13. Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action, Washington D.C., World Bank, 1981. Cf. Amin, Samir, 'Critique du rapport de la Banque Mondiale pour l'Afrique', Africa Development, No. 1-2, 1982; 'Un développement autocentré est-il possible en Afrique?' in Ahooja-Patel, Krishna, Drabek, Anne Gordon, and Nerfin, Marc, World Economy in Transition: essays presented to Surendra Patel on his 60th birthday. Oxford, Pergamon. 1986.

After this book was written, the World Bank produced a new report on adjustment in Africa. This report is a little less arrogant than the Berg report commented upon here; it pays lip service to the issue of the 'social negative aspects' of adjustment. Yet it proceeds from the same methodology and basically unscientific assumptions, which disregard the polarizing dimension of actually existing capitalism, ignoring therefore that these 'social negative aspects' are, precisely, pan and parcel of the political rationale of the targets of the adjustment.

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