Agricultural Development in Darfur Region, Sudan with Special Reference to Innovation, Technical Change and Open Access Resources

This London University PhD Thesis thesis examines agrarian change in Darfur over the first seven decades of the twentieth century. Based on extensive socio-economic surveys carried out during the 1980s, it describes how the Darfur economy had developed rapidly through expansion of the cropped area, the adoption of a range of new technologies, and exploitation of export opportunities. From 1972, a series of droughts resulted in increased relief and development efforts. Famine and desertification led to an emphasis on conservation as well as development. The Tragedy of the Commons thesis was been influential. Three main models of agrarian change are tested against the evidence from Darfur: Schultz' "Transforming Traditional Agriculture", Myint's "Vent for Surplus" and Boserup's "Autonomous Transformation". A distinction is drawn between those models, (Schultz and Myint), which suggest that traditional agriculture has special characteristics and models which see change as a function of a shifting resource endowment, (Boserup). The first view is implicit in aid-funded development programmes which attempt to overcome the 'special characteristics' of traditional economies. They have had little success in Darfur. Attempts to tackle the Tragedy of the Commons have also failed. Darfur has many traditional characteristics. Nevertheless, institutions are flexible, adaptive and no obstacle to agrarian change. There is clear evidence of how they evolved in response to shifting resource endowments, market opportunities in particular. When that process did come to a halt it was the result of a failure of political and economic management at the macro-level. Political development had been influenced by both pre-colonial and colonial history, but the macro-failure was also a reflection of what can be described as the current political resource endowment; that is to say the balance between the governor and the governed. Because aid resources are so substantial they have a very important impact on that balance