Education, Infrastructure and Instability in East African Agriculture: Implications for Structural Adjustment Programs

The production function approach is used to analyze the role of farmers’ education, infrastructure, and political instability on aggregate agricultural production in East Africa. Lack of price data prevent application of modern duality approaches. All countries in the region are assumed to be faced with a common production function. The analysis indicates that East African agriculture has benefitted from: conventional factor endowments (land, labor and livestock); modern inputs (machinery and fertilizer); human capital development; and infrastructure. In addition, strong complementarity appears to exist among these groups of resources. The results also show that political and civil instability has taken a serious toll on agricultural output in the region. It is argued that World Bank structural adjustment programs need to give further attention to non-price factors (such as farmers’ education and rural infrastructure) in combination with price-0incentives for production and modern input use.