POLICY AND POLITICAL CONSTRAINTS ON AGRICULTURAL-DEVELOPMENT AND FOOD-PRODUCTION IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

Since the beginning of the 1970s, Sub-Saharan Africa has been plagued by chronic food shortage and famine. Domestic production has fallen be low subsistence level primarily because of very poor agricultural yiel ds. The problem is largely due to the neglect of agricultural developm ent for an extended period of time by African governments. The finding s in this paper indicate that policy and political factors are among s ome of the factors which are associated with this problem. There are s ignificant associations between these factors and the dependent variab les of per capita food production and a quality of life index. The ind ependent variables explain a considerable amount of the variance in th ese dependent variables.