African Association of Agricultural Economists. Shaping the Future of African
Agriculture for Development: The Role of Social Scientists. Proceedings of the Inaugural
Symposium, 6 to 8 December 2004, Grand Regency Hotel, Nairobi, Kenya
Expanding the Frontiers of Agricultural Economics to Meet the Future Challenges of Agricultural
Development
Johann Kirsten
Head of Department, Agricultural Economics, Extension and Rural Development, University of Pretoria,
P.O. Box 14303 Hatfield 0028, Pretoria, South Africa, Tel: 27 12 420 3248 or 27 12 420 7576
Fax: 27 12 420 3247, Email: johann.kirsten@up.ac.za
Abstract: In this paper I challenge the theoretical building blocks of agricultural economics and then
provide some indication of how the discipline has rectified some of its shortcomings. The introduction of
the New Institutional Economics into our discipline has been a major improvement. I have then argued that
the challenges facing our profession are so huge that we need to think about further adaptation by making
more use of other social sciences such as sociology and anthropology. This could help us understand the
major complexities of dealing with the challenge of black economic empowerment in agriculture. This will
however, also be necessary for us to adjust our research paradigm. This argument is well articulated by
Doyer and Van Rooyen (2001) when they motivated a research method to study agribusiness supply chains.
The challenges highlighted that for agricultural economic analysis to capture complex business reality and
decisions to explain and predict the institutional and governance structures and optimal resource allocation
behaviour of firms, approaches to research that combines positivist and constructivist are the most sensible.
The combination of these approaches enables a holistic approach to the research problem. Positivism’s
strong explanatory and prediction capabilities are combined with the strong understanding and
reconstructive capabilities of the constructivist appr