The point of departure of this paper is that African nations cannot afford to ignore smallholder agriculture, however difficult its prospects may seem. Region wide, at the beginning of the 1990's, 85 percent of Africa's population was rural, and more than a quarter of the labour force was actively engaged in agriculture, overwhelmingly on smallholder operations, with the exception of South Africa (United Nations Development Program figures cited in Bryceson, 1996). Even in South Africa, where large private farms are common, more than half the agricultural population of 2.5 million is estimated to work at least part-time on smallholdings (Simbi, 1998). Smallholder agriculture is simply too important to employment, human welfare, and political stability in sub-Saharan Africa (hereinafter "Africa", for convenience) to be either ignored or treated as just another small adjusting sector of a market economy, akin to the leather shoe industry in the United States.