In Africa after independence, many countries attempted to ‘modernize’ their agricultural sectors through large-scale farming, providing subsidized credit, machinery, and land. These efforts almost universally failed (Eicher and Baker 1992). One of the largest and most well-documented cases was mechanized large scale sorghum and sesame production in Sudan that originated in attempts by financiers from the Gulf following the 1970s oil price spike, to transform the country into a regional breadbasket. Schemes with very favorable access to land and subsidized credit for machinery attracted civil servants and businessmen who mostly hired managers for farms of over 1,000 ha, with some.
