West African farming does really well internationally only with crops where its hot, humid climate gives it an overwhelming advantage, cocoa being the prime example. Cocoa accounts for over 50%  of West Africa's agricultural exports (FAO, Agricultural Growth...p. 105), but even in this sector, the region faces rising challenges from a few other areas of the world with similar climate, such as Indonesia. Without cocoa the West African agricultural picture would be even bleaker.  In rice, a vital West African food, the yield was 2009 kg/ha for the period 2008-2012. In Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole the figure was 2,523, in South-Eastern Asia 4,136 kg/ha. For oil palm the West African yield was 3,261 kg/ha, Sub-Saharan Africa 3,863 and South-East Asia 18,868 kg/ha (all figures FAO, p. 76). Why does West Africa, despite its apparent advantages, perform so poorly in agriculture relative to the rest of the world? Surely many of the problems listed above by the FAO are shared or were shared at the outset (Independence) with many other countries around the world. How did they rise above the problems whilst West Africa has been unable to? And why is the situation more or less the same in all countries of the region? Could there be a common factor driving the lethargy?

Again and again, I am drawn to the issue of land tenure. West African agricultural lands are overwhelmingly held under customary, communal land tenure. Unlike East and Southern Africa, plantation agriculture never took strong hold in West Africa. West African lands are generally not bought or sold and are not subject to market forces. They are held without formal title by communities and families, usually under the overall direction of traditional chiefs. Individual ownership in perpetuity is for the most part forbidden. In practice, capital investment on these farms is extremely limited. This was perhaps acceptable when these were small, isolated communities more or less cut off from the rest of the world. In today's world, these agricultural producers face direct competition from the international market. International rice, Thai, Burmese, Vietnamese, Indian, what have you, floods West African markets and even West African villages. Why enter battle against the might of the international free market with one hand tied behind the back? Why exclude one of your most formidable weapons (capital) in a contest against the rest of the world?

Maintaining two economic systems within a single national entity, as all West African nations do, is fraught with difficulty. There is almost inevitably a steady, debilitating flight of people and capital from one to the other. In the West African setting, the movement is of course away from the communal land tenure of the countryside and towards the freehold system of the cities. Ivory Coast is the exception that proves the rule. Of all West Africans the Ivorians are unquestionably the top agricultural nation. Ivory Coast is, by a large margin, the world's top cocoa producer and exporter. Due to its huge cocoa exports Ivory Coast enjoys a large agricultural trade balance with the rest of the world. The country is also West Africa's leading exporter of coffee, palm oil, rubber, cashew nuts and bananas (FAO, Agricultural Growth..., p. 105). However, the Ivorian miracle is not all it seems. The country's large agricultural exports were stimulated by official government encouragement for farmers in the  north of the country and beyond to move into the more fertile south. But the position of these "strangers" was always somewhat vulnerable within customary land systems and made even more so by a 1998 law introduced by then-President Bedié that strengthened the hand of the locals, some of whom returned from the cities to reclaim "their" lands. The large migrant community in the Ivory Coast, some citizens, some not, without clear title to land under the traditional land tenure system, became a factor in the country's ensuing conflicts (Land, Agricultural Change and Conflict in West Africa. Regional Issues from Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cote d'Ivoire). For all its agricultural success, Ivory Coast is in the bottom 25 of the UN's HDI. Much of its agriculture suffers from the same problem of low productivity as the rest of West Africa (FAO, Agricultural Growth...,table 3-5). Its exports are built on mobilising large numbers of farm workers on large amounts of land rather than on improving land productivity (output per hectare) and labour productivity (output per farmer).

The dinosaur of African communalism refuses to die even as its distant, vastly  more formidable cousin, communism, has retreated almost into obscurity in the face of capitalism's march. Socio-economic systems developed for small, isolated tribal units deep within West Africa's rain forests still hold sway in a modern, highly interconected era that thrives on freedom of movement, of information, of capital, of goods. These are the vitals that oil economies all round the rest of the world, the antithesis of the closed societal culture from which West Africa's traditions of lineage, "strangers" and tutorat have emerged. Of course the traditional West African systems are grossly uncompetitive.

These traditional systems are protected by a fierce lobby within West Africa and without. First and foremost the rural elite, the chiefs and the heads of families, clans and communities, who benefit greatly from control of this most important resource. Secondly, in many instances, the political elite in the capitals, who have ultimate control over the rural elite. And thirdly, the worldwide liberal movement, which ideologically believes all socio-cultural systems are equal and is opposed to any policy that smacks of imposition of "Western" values. This liberal lobby is well represented in powerful global institutions like the UN and its agencies, the World Bank and IMF, the ADB and other multilateral and bilateral aid organizations.

Land reform has been on the fringes of the political agenda for many years in West Africa. I research the subject and find The Sahel Club's 2006 paper,  Land Reform Processes in West Africa, A Review. It provides a brief history of land law in all fifteen countries of ECOWAS plus Cameroon, Chad and Mauritania and a summary of the efforts then being undertaken at reform. It reveals an intractable, complex and diverse customary land tenure regime throughout the region, fiercely resistant to change for decades. People have been highlighting this problem for the last forty or fifty years. It's an impossible situation. In Sierra Leone, private property was introduced to Freetown by the Settlers in the 1780s. A few decades later the same thing happened in Liberia. Even though the forms of government in the two countries were diametrically opposite, one a Settler government, the other a colonial one, the end result in so far as the land regimes were concerned was identical: an enclave of private property surrounded by huge swathes of communally-held countryside. Introduction of plantations in Ivory Coast, Guinea and elsewhere by the French again failed to budge the traditional systems.  

Freehold title encourages investment, both private and commercial. The miracle of compounding means that over the fifty or sixty odd years since Independence, even tiny amounts of yearly investment add up to large productivity enhancing improvements on the land. The invisible hand of capitalism triumphs. If Pa Chan, in Thailand, and Pa Kofi in Ghana operated equally capitalized farms in 1957, when Ghana attained Independence, and if Pa Chan was able to achieve an annual investment rate just one percent greater than Pa Kofi because of the attractions of his freehold ownership, today sixty years later, Pa Chan's descendants would be blessed with a considerably larger and more productive farm than would Pa Kofi's. Within the freehold system, the investments of thousands and thousands of individual farmers, the built-up capital, are handed down securely to their trusted  designees, usually their children, to be built upon and amplified, rather than disappearing within the communal system into the no-man's land of the extended family or the community, where every individual wonders who might be the eventual beneficiary of his contemplated investment.

If the enormities of a huge agricultural deficit and world-trailing human development were not enough, West Africa faces other, major challenges, including political, ethnic, religious and separatist tensions, declining patriotism evidenced by a growing migration, legal and illegal, to the West, and the rise of Boku Haram and militant Islam. There are differences between the different countries of course, but for the region as a whole, these problems are getting worse, not better. Does all this mean West African states are in danger of imminent collapse. Maybe, maybe not. But after fifty to sixty years of Independence will they all survive in their present form another fifty or sixty years? Probably not. Independence brought hope of a better life. That hope cemented the union of disparate tribes, religions and cultures into bright young nations. After two generations, in many West African countries, that hope is almost dead.