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Abstract
Over the last ten years, international donors and African governments have singled out
“inappropriate policies” as a major factor influencing the poor performance of the agricultural
sector and the chronic problem of human hunger. Faced with increasing budget deficits, declining
export earnings, and diminishing access to sources of capital, African governments, as a
condition for receiving debt relief, have been compelled to implement macroeconomic and sectoral
policy reforms - structural adjustments - aimed at rectifying the disincentive policies and
improving the external and domestic public accounts. The reorientation of reforms in the
agricultural sector has centered on improving agricultural incentives through liberalization of
input and output markets and decontrolling prices, which are considered by many experts to be
more theoretically appropriate policies.