Land Privatization and Cash Crop Production Undermining Food Security in West Africa

Africa's population has been rising rapidly during the past decades and is now projected to reach about 1.1 billion by 2015. Given such population dynamics, and the difficulty with reliance on global food markets, the rate of domestic food production will have to be increased dramatically in order for the region to be able to feed its burgeoning population. An initial step to-ward this end is deciding how the region's land should be owned and used. Can African countries achieve food security through a strategy of land privati-zation in which individual holders emphasize cash crop production for global and domestic urban markets? Is such privatized tenure and crop commer-cialization an inevitable outcome of population pressure? Or, can African traditional landholding systems evolve in alternative ways that bypass the privatization route, promote efficient land use, and encourage rural farm investments and food production? This book argues that under certain social, political, and institutional gover-ning conditions West African traditional tenure institutions can evolve into cooperative arrangements that are more sustaining of land use and food sufficiency. Government policy makers, international development practitio-ners, African agricultural researchers, and students will find this book infor-mative, innovative, and stimulating.