zlacker

>>sebg+(OP)
I wonder what the long term solutions to these kinds of problems are in East Africa and similar contexts.

The remnants of colonialism continue to produce winners and losers economically, with the winners stuck in local maxima where they extract value from the people, but the people themselves see only marginal benefit, and development is stuck at a snail's pace.

As with seemingly everything in life, the incentives for the different players really don't line up. Consumers lose, producers lose, and only a select few middlemen win anything at all.

>>noodle+G5
Perversely enough, consolidation of production into 'big agra' and mechanized might be the best play to disrupt the existing system for something more efficient and less stagnant. There are myriad paths to get to said endpoint however, not all of them equal. I don't expect said path to go well for smallholders by definition, though even though the survivors would no longer qualify as smallholders for one reason or the other.

Winners and losers I must note are the result of any system, even in ones of very high equity or even or especially a 'null system'.