Are Self-Sufficient Agrarian Villages in Africa Really Poor?

Abstract

The development goals were set out in the Millennium Declaration in 2000 and express the resolve of the world's political leaders to free people from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty. The extreme income poverty was defined by a dollar-per-day threshold. The author has a doubt to this poverty line from my research experience. This paper focused on the Kaonde shifting cultivator society of northwestern Zambia and examined the multi-subsistence activities of slash-and-burn cultivation, hunting, gathering and fishing, as well as food sharing system and life history. The Kaonde people sustain the self-sufficient by obtaining the daily living necessities, mainly food from their environment. Although the agrarian villages, even in the remote area of Zambia, have connections with market economy, the sharing system and moral economy were predominant, rather than business of buying and selling. The agrarian villagers still maintain the self-sufficient and the lifestyle does not need a dollar-per-day. All the people living below the poverty line of "a dollar-per-day" are not equal with people suffering from the hunger and poverty. Recent years, the market-based land reform promotes the introduction of foreign capital, and simultaneously land enclosure and conversions for elites in the customary land. As African economy strengthens the connection with global system, the African people will face the drastic changes. We are apprehensive that the self-sufficient people will be really positioned as the poor under the market economy.