Authors
Ewout Frankema, Michiel de Haas, Tanik Joshipura and Tom Westland
Abstract
When agrarian societies urbanize their governments face a policy dilemma: farmers seek fair prices, while urban workers and employers desire cheap food. Drawing on a new dataset of historical food prices in 146 markets, we explore the political economy of maize markets in East Africa (1900-2020). We show that from the 1940s onwards, maize prices soared from far below to well above world market levels. Instead of ‘urban bias’, we argue that prolonged evasion by late-colonial and early post-colonial governments of the socio-economic trade-offs inherent in the dilemma triggered the 1980s food crises and turned East African maize expensive.