Famine in East Africa: Food Production and Food Policies

Efforts to commercialize agriculture in peasant societies through investments in technology and various pricing strategies have failed to create the food surpluses needed to forestall famine and support industrialization in East Africa. Seavoy explores this problem, basing his study on the case of Tanzania, a country that experiences recurrent peacetime famines associated with failures in subsistence agriculture. He investigates the failures of East African national agricultural policies and defines strategies for inducing subsistence farmers to shift to commercial production.