Jane Guyer - Feeding African Cities

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Jane I. Guyer was trained in sociology (BA) at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and in social anthropology (PhD) at the University of Rochester, New York. She has done field research on the social organisation of agriculture in Southern Nigeria and Southern Cameroon. Her dissertation was entitled The organisational plan of traditional farming: Idere, Western Nigeria. Publications include a monograph, Family and Farm in Southern Cameroon (Boston University, African Studies Center Research Studies No. 15), and articles on local economic history, changing household and kinship organisation in modern Africa, and womens farming.

Michael Watts was educated as a geographer at University College, London and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and currently teaches in Geography and Development Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. He has conducted field research in Nigeria, Senegal, and The Gambia and published on famine and food policy, peasant differentiation, agro-ecology in dryland areas in the Sahel, and small-scale rice production systems. He is currently completing a study of the social history of rice in The Gambia and embarking upon research into petty commodity production and the social organisation of agriculture in California.

Deborah Bryceson graduated from the University of Dar es Salaam with a BA and MA in Geography. She is presently writing a DPhil thesis on Tanzanian food insecurity at St Antonys College, Oxford, and was previously employed at the Institute of Resource Assessment, University of Dar es Salaam, where she was involved in research projects concerned with female employment.

Paul Mosley is Professor of Development Economics and Policy at the University of Manchester. He has been economic advisor to the Kenya Treasury and the UK Overseas Development Administration, and is the author of The Settler Economies. Studies in the Economic History of Kenya and Southern Rhodesia (Cambridge University Press, 1983) and Overseas Aid: Its Defence and Reform (Harvester Press, 1986). His current research interests are in conditional aid and rural credit.

This volume has taken several years to bring to fruition, for reasons which have to do with the kind of research undertaken on African rural economies. Relatively little primary research is conceived in a collaborative way or oriented towards producing information and interpretations amenable to framed comparison. The cases in this volume are no exception; each author had completed field research before recruitment into the collective project. In no case had urban food supply been the central subject of field or archival research; in fact, the centres of gravity in the authors total corpus of work span a wide spectrum, from local to national and comparative levels. Realisation of the possibility of reconstructing a history of urban food supply systems emerged from our separate attempts to concretise national processes or to contextualise local processes. Each authors work had already been marked by theoretical stance and primary research interest, and had already been consolidated in published reports. It was therefore a challenge for both the authors and the editor to bring their guiding questions within a certain range of consonance with one another, to make the cases amenable to comparison as well as to present them in all their particularly.