Land Relations in African Countries

Abstract

Agriculture is the main sphere of material production in all African countries. It is generally recognised that all African countries, excepting the South African Republic, belong to the group of under-developed agrarian countries. It is impossible to define the exact share of agriculture in the total annual output because of the predominance of the subsistence economy, and the almost total absence of statistics on this phase of labour. As a rule, the available statistics underestimate the share of agricultural output. Some idea about the role of agriculture in African economies can be gained from the data on the distribution of rural and urban population. Though in the past 20 years there has been considerable movement from villages to towns, nevertheless the rural population in various countries still constitutes from 67 per cent in Egypt (1957) to 96 per cent in Togo (1956). Only in the South African Republic is the urban population nearly half (46·6 per cent in 1951) of the whole population.1