If you look at total output, Peter Coy notes that sub-Saharan Africa looks quite impressive with gains in total output exceeding that in the rest of the world.

But almost all of this has come from using more inputs, especially land. If you look at output per unit of input, i.e. total factor productivity (TFP) then sub-Saharan Africa not only trails the rest of the world, it’s falling behind.

Things get much worse if you look at agricultural productivity by country. Alice Evans points us to “the most important graph” from work by Suri et al. (2024) which shows shockingly that since ~2010 agricultural productivity has plummeted in many African nations. I found this graph hard to believe.

The numbers are correct based on data from the USDA but digging deeper, I noted that the two worst performing countries are Djibouti and Botswana–two small countries where agriculture is less than 5% of GDP and where climate and land mean that agriculture has no hope of ever being a great success. Moreover, Djibouti is growing rapidly and Botswana is a middle-income country with a booming economy. I suspect that what is going on here is that a growing economy is pulling the best (unmeasured) people and resources out of agriculture which leads what was already a small sector to become less productive on paper, albeit at no great loss to the economy.

In contrast, the countries where Ag TFP is rising the most are Zimbabwe and Senegal where agriculture is a much larger share of GDP and employment (Zimbabwe ~11-14% of GDP, 70% of employment and Senegal 16% of GDP, 30% of employment). So the good news is that agricultural productivity is growing in places where it is important.

Bottom line is that agricultural productivity in Africa is low. I see the primary cause as being small firms which means there are few opportunities for economies of scale, mechanization and R&D (see Suri et al. (2024) for a longer discussion.). Climate change is a threat and developing climate-resistant crops, especially for Africa where heat stress will become increasingly important, has high potential returns.

Overall, however, my conclusion is that although agricultural productivity in Africa is low and there are threats on the horizon the situation is getting modestly better rather than dramatically worse.