Interlinked markets and the cash crop-food crop debate in land- abundant tropical agriculture

Interlinked markets combine the markets for labor, land, credit, and insurance within a single contract or transaction. The purpose of this article is to illustrate how such institutions do arise in the African context under certain preconditions. It is argued that the lack of a land market, due largely to a "non-capitalist conception of property rights over land,' along with other conditions to be examined, leads to the failure of labor and private-sector credit markets. In response, indigenous institutions have evolved to cope with the market failures. Section II examines the reasons for and implications of missing markets in the land-abundant African context by synthesizing selected recent developments in the literature on this subject. Section III, introduces the production of annual cash crops into a subsistence-oriented agrarian system and examines its effects on houshold organization, and in Sections IV and V, which empirically test some of the results and hypotheses developed in Section III. Data I collected in Senegal are used for the empirical analyses. The concluding section draws select policy implications for structural transformation and food self-sufficiency. -from Author