The performance of African agriculture is now a concern to the global community more than it was a decade ago (AGRA, 2013; Bates & Block, 2013; de Janvry & Sadoulet, 2010). It is increasingly blamed for causing global poverty as it fails to sustain the lives of Africans who depend on it for livelihood.

According to economists, the current production systems in African agriculture are inefficient because they engage the largest proportion of the continent’s land and labour to produce very little marketable surplus which is needed for growth. In other words, by engaging 60% of her labour in unproductive agricultural activities, Africa is holding back her own economic growth. And this makes existing agricultural production systems the target for Africa’s economic solutions.

However, my concern, is very much linked to the established view that majority of those engaged in agriculture in Africa are poor, illiterate and live in rural areas deprived of amenities like electricity, water, transportation and communication infrastructure, allegedly important for modernization. In my opinion, this view has constructed a ‘victim of unfair development’ whose interpretations evoke sympathy and empathy from the developed world, where countries are perceived to have been favoured by the development discourse.

And by looking through the eyes of ‘victimhood’, development policy and practice see rural producers as ‘victims of marginalization’, ‘victims of resource deprivation’, ‘victims of bad policies (governance)’, and ‘victims of bad development interventions’, etc. While I may not have problems with the observation that rural producers are marginalised, my problem is how the observation is then used to define development policies and programmes. Often, this leads to using identities like ‘the vulnerable’, the ‘marginalised’, ‘the resource poor’, ‘the poorest of the poor’, ‘traditional producers’, etc. which tend to justify and determine the type of interventions thought to be particularly appropriate.

Within the ‘victim’ perspective, agricultural interventions often protect and even patronise the small producer. As a result, only what is perceived to be ‘within the victim’s means’ is allowed. Any effort to expose him or her to higher levels of resource use, (or risks), is deemed ‘unsustainable’, ‘exploiting’ or increasing vulnerability. Unfortunately, for the past 50 years this kind of gatekeeping has been the norm, and the vulnerable are still vulnerable, and so are the marginalised- even where projects worth millions of dollars were implemented to help them. The fact is, this kind of gatekeeping starts and ends with a victim, because what justified the victim tends to persist throughout the project. It is not eliminated in the course of implementation.

My questions are therefore, from whose eyes does the victim emerge?

And from whose choice of a path is the victimhood expected to end?

My argument here is that, and learning from the analysis of different agricultural interventions in developing countries, there are no victims in agricultural development. Rather we have different people developing from different contexts and following different paths. Thus what matters is the presence of unbounded exposure to choices (of both opportunities and solutions-technological or not) and the capacity to pursue expectations embedded in those choices (i.e. capacity to identify needs, to seek and utilize solutions).  Therefore, the role of the poor to interact and negotiate in development should not be ignored. The poor too have the right to negotiate and compromise as necessary.

We should stop looking at the poor as ‘lame’ and ‘weak’ who cannot choose to change trajectories and adapt. Rather, we should learn from their surprisingly high adoption of mobile phones and recognize the ability to reconfigure and reorganise systems (both in behavior and structures), intrinsic in every community , including of all other kinds of specie.

All the African poor needs is unbounded exposure to choices, and support during experimentation and learning.