This project involves a workshop to be held in Wageningen, Netherlands, in May 1995. The workshop will involves 11 US-based scholars and 17 scholars from Europe and Africa. The topic is the review and development of knowledge about African farming productivity based on long-term ethnographic studies. Scholars will discuss what has been learned so far and work out research strategies to fill in the gaps and advance our understanding of the causes of high and low productivity in African agriculture. The perspectives involved will join detailed studies of local systems with larger scale regional and global change studies. This conference is important because rates of population growth in Africa are far higher than rates of growth of food production. Understanding the variations in agricultural productivity from a community-based and decision-making perspective can help planners design policies to improve the rate of growth of African food production.
