Economic and Political Reform in Africa by Peter D. Little

Author:Peter D. Little
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Historical Context

The language and classification process of NTCs reflect a set of global changes that are closely associated with free trade policies and the structural adjustment programs that were discussed in the introduction. 2 This observation is especially relevant to Ghana and The Gambia, which were among the first “adjusters” on the continent to undergo wide-ranging structural reforms in the early 1980s. In the hopes of increasing trade revenues and reducing the state's role in agriculture, development agencies and their dependent African states heavily pushed for private-sector-led export diversification and NTC programs (see Mannon 2005; Minot and Ngigi 2004; World Bank 1989; Humphrey 2004). As implemented in practice, the concept of an NTC is ripe with contradictions and uncertainties since what constitutes a nontraditional export product changes both within and across national boundaries. For example, under a USAID trade program in Ghana in the 1990s the yam, a tuber crop indigenous to West Africa and a local food staple, is classified as a nontraditional export. On the other hand, cocoa, an industrial commodity introduced by the British in the last century, is considered a traditional export.

The contradictions are even sillier in East Africa, where in Uganda coffee and cotton are labeled as traditional products, but maize and some varieties of local beans qualify as NTCs because they have not been exported to overseas markets in the past. The whole range of “exotic” produce (for example, mangoes), high-value horticultural products (for instance, green beans and cut flowers), and spices—the so-called niche crops that have received such a strong endorsement from the World Bank (World Bank 1994 and 2007a)—mainly fall into the category of non-traditional. The dividing lines, however, are often blurred, and business entrepreneurs and politicians have been known to petition the government, often via an export promotion unit, to have a certain product reclassified as a nontraditional export in order to receive a subsidy or credit. Since the export of NTCs in such countries as Ghana is exempted from government export tariffs and is eligible for tax rebates, there are strong incentives to pursue this strategy (see Takane 2004: 31). Thus, a planner with one mark of a pen can reclassify an entire commodity regime, its farmers, and traders into a category worthy of investment and promotion and, as well be discussed later in the chapter, instigate agrarian changes with widespread social and political implications.

The notion of a NTC takes on a whole set of powerful associations in states such as Ghana and The Gambia. Table 1.1 lists some of these hidden attributes that were implicitly endorsed by the economic reform programs of the 1980s and 1990s. While production and trade in traditional export commodities, such as groundnuts (The Gambia) and cocoa (Ghana), symbolized the old statist policies and “backward-looking” programs of agriculture, the NTC business is seen as progressive, export-driven, and entrepreneurial. In short, it signifies a new market-savvy Africa with linkages to transnational companies, fiscally conservative budget reformers, and true believers in the benefits of global commerce.

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