During the 1980s and 1990s, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank forced governments across Africa to implement neoliberal structural adjustment programs (SAPs). SAPs compelled post-colonial governments to cut public services and public-sector production, remove labour market regulations and wage protections, privatize sovereign assets, and eliminate protectionist measures and industrial policy aimed at achieving sovereign industrial development.
These reforms dismantled the progressive policies that were then being pursued by African nationalists and socialists, who were seeking to build their industrial base and improve living standards following the catastrophe of European colonialism. Many African leaders and scholars—including Thomas Sankara and Samir Amin — emphasized that SAPs worked to re-impose the imperial relationship, by asserting Western control over national economic policy, cheapening African resources, and organizing production around exports within global commodity chains.
It is well-known that SAPs had a devastating impact on the peoples of Africa. Between 1980 and 1994, Africa’s per capita GDP declined from around $4,500 to below $4,200 U.S. (2023 PPP). Incomes did not recover until 2001. In other words, SAPs imposed a recession that lasted for over two decades.
Studies show that SAPs were associated with elevated child and maternal mortality rates, higher levels of poverty, and a deterioration in human development outcomes. In some cases, the crisis was so severe that it triggered a reduction in people’s physical stature, a sign of extreme nutritional stress and a breakdown in public health. For instance, people born in Tanzania in the 1980s were around a centimetre shorter than people born a decade — or even a century — earlier.
Recent data on Africa’s material resource use — i.e., the total quantity of material stuff (in tons) used by African economies — provides new insights into how this crisis played out. ‘Domestic extraction’ (DE) per capita refers to the total quantity of raw materials extracted from the environment in Africa — in other words, all the biomass, metals, minerals, construction materials, and fossil fuels produced by Africa’s mines, farms, forests, fisheries, etc.
DE declined by over 10% during the 1980s and 1990s, under structural adjustment. This strongly suggests that SAPs induced a recession, or decline in physical production, which is consistent with data showing declining GDP per capita during that period.
Crucially, however, Africa’s ‘material footprint’ (MF) per capita declined by substantially more than domestic extraction. MF refers to the total quantity of raw materials consumed in Africa, including those embodied in imported goods and excluding those embodied in exported goods. African consumption declined by 20% from 1980 through the 1990s, and only recovered to its previous levels in 2013.
The decline in African consumption was more severe than the decline in production.
Of course, a decline in material use can sometimes result from efficiency improvements, but this normally only occurs in developed economies with strong technological endowment, and is accompanied by rising GDP. This is not what occurred in Africa, where GDP declined at the same time. Indeed, African countries were not operating at the technological frontier where such efficiency improvements generally occur — a problem which was exacerbated by SAPs that slashed public investment in technological development.
After 1980, Africans were producing less, but they were consuming even less than they produced. Where did the missing output go? It was exported to the rest of the world, and without an equivalent material return.
This is a portion of “Plundering Africa;” to read the full story, visit www.roape.net.