Cereal price shocks and volatility in Sub-Saharan Africa: What does really matter for farmers' welfare?

After the 2007-08 food crisis, addressing high and volatile cereal prices became a priority for national governments in Sub-Saharan Africa because of their key role in determining consumption and income of poor smallholders. Nevertheless, the lack of information and some misperceptions on the distinction between the welfare consequences of higher versus more volatile cereal prices limited the effectiveness of policy interventions. Using household-level data, this paper empirically investigates the different effects of the two phenomena and provides an estimate of their magnitude and distributional consequences in four SSA countries over the period 2011-2012. The results show that the impacts of higher and more volatile prices on welfare heavily depend on the domestic structure of the economy. The most important factors to consider are the different weight of food consumption over total expenditure, the shares of the food budget devoted to cereals, the substitution effect among food items, and the relative number of net sellers versus net buyers accessing the market. We also find that the impact of higher substantially outweigh the effects of more volatile prices on farmers' welfare across the entire income distribution in all four countries. As a consequence, farmers are likely to benefit more from policy interventions preventing or limiting cereal price increases than (untargeted and extremely expensive) price stabilization policies. Nevertheless, our results also suggest that some targeted policy interventions aimed at reducing the exposure to cereal price volatility of the poorest quintile of the population is still required to protect them from substantial welfare losses

Concrétiser les politiques agricoles communes africaines

Partant du constat que les initiatives d’intégration régionale centrées sur l’agriculture se sont multipliées ces dernières années en Afrique, l’article s’intéresse aux principaux facteurs pouvant expliquer le faible niveau de mise en oeuvre des politiques agricoles communes (PACs) et propose des pistes pour leur concrétisation. Les auteurs avancent que la mise en place de PACs peut se réaliser à condition qu’il existe une base nationale s’appuyant sur un débat sur les objectifs assignés à l’agriculture et relayé par des documents de politiques légitimés. Une telle situation nationale apparaît indispensable à l’émergence de toute stratégie au niveau régional. Trois leviers y sont proposés pour faciliter cette concrétisation : i) l’amélioration des articulations techniques, politiques et institutionnelles entre les échelles nationale et régionale ; ii) la promotion de mesures de politiques de soutien à la production ; enfin, iii) la nécessité de renforcer la mécanique institutionnelle intra régionale.Based on the premise that regional integration initiatives focusing on agriculture have significantly increased in recent years in Africa, the paper examines the main factors that may explain the low level of implementation of common agricultural policies (CAPs) and suggests ways for putting them into practice. The authors argue that the establishment of CAPs can be achieved provided that a strong national basis exists that should include an elaborated, open, and participatory national policy debate on the objectives assigned to agriculture. The latter should translate into national policy documents being legitimized, consistent and implemented. Such a situation at the national level is essential to allow any substantial and sustainable strategy for agriculture at regional level. More specifically, three main domains are proposed to put CAPs into practice: i) improve technical, political and institutional linkages between national and regional levels; ii) adopt policy measures to support production; and iii) strengthen intra-regional institutional mechanisms

Agricultural Value Chain Development and Regional Integration Processes

Domestic and international supply and demand shocks are an important driver of NRP fluctuations through their impacts on relative border or domestic prices. The East African Community (EAC) is a regional intergovernmental organization, formed in 2000 between Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, and today consisting of the founding members together with Burundi, Rwanda and South Sudan. Since 2010 cooperation has consisted of a common market and a customs union, with duty-free intra-regional trade and a..

Exploring opportunities around climate-smart breeding for future food and nutrition security

There is a 95% chance that warming will exceed 2°C by the end of the century (Raftery et al. 2017). Global crop productivity is projected to fall by 5-10 % per degree of warming (Challinor et al. 2014), with even greater losses likely for some crops in some areas. The challenge of meeting future food demand is increasing, and climate change is already diminishing our ability to adapt through crop breeding (Challinor et al. 2016; Aggarwal et al. 2019). Recent research is suggesting that increases in climate variability are already affecting the number of food-insecure people, and that increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations may affect the nutrient content of some food staples, with serious implications for food and nutrition security (Smith and Myers 2018). New crop varieties will be needed that can deliver higher yields as well as possessing the ability to withstand heat and greater tolerances for the secondary effects of a warmer world, such as increased pressures from drought, water-logging, pests and diseases, and reduced nutritional quality due to higher levels of CO2. The systems for accelerated delivery of climate-resilient varieties into food producers’ hands need to be massively upgraded (Cramer 2018). Innovative holistic breeding strategies for multiple traits will be needed that embrace the full pipeline from trait discovery to varietal deployment and seed system development

Does trade policy impact food and agriculture global value chain participation of Sub-Saharan African countries?

The emergence of food and agriculture global value chains (GVCs) is challenging the way scholars look at trade data, as well as how policy makers establish their trade policies. The common perception is that Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, unlike most Latin American and Asian countries, are not deeply integrated into global production networks. Consequently, it is believed that the border protection policies of the former may have a limited impact on GVC participation. This paper challenges this conventional knowledge in two ways. First, by decomposing bilateral gross export into its value added components, we show that the sectoral and bilateral SSA participation in GVC for food and agriculture is substantial. Second, we demonstrate that trade policies impact backward and forward value chain linkages. These results call for a refinement of trade policy priorities in SSA

Le double paradoxe de la mise en place de politiques agricoles communes en Afrique. Un cas improbable de transfert de politique publique

International audienceCommon agricultural policies in Africa have emerged and multiplied in the last decade. This can be understood as resulting from specific policy transfers. The first part of the paper underlines a very high level of influence by external actors (international organisations, bilateral cooperation, NGOs) on both the nature (policy objectives, instruments) and decision processes of these policies. The second part looks at the reception of the policy transfers. Despite a very low level of implementation of the policies, some learning processes can be underlined, as regarding peasants’ organisations in particular. The emergence of these common agricultural policies have provided them with new political resources and arenas, and they are now in a better position to participate actively to the evolving contemporary debate on agricultural policies in Africa.Cet article s’intéresse à la multiplication des projets de mise en place de politiques agricoles communes en Afrique depuis le début des années 2000, qu’il propose d’aborder comme une forme de transfert de politique publique. Il souligne tout d’abord une très forte influence extérieure dans l’émergence de ces politiques (bailleurs de fonds internationaux, coopération bilatérales, ONG), qui se manifeste tant dans leurs objectifs et instruments, que dans leurs processus d’élaboration. L’article s’intéresse ensuite à la réception de ces transferts en soulignant que malgré leur très faible niveau de mise en œuvre, les ébauches de mise en place et les débats autour des politiques agricoles communes ont favorisé des processus d’apprentissage. Les organisations paysannes en particulier en ont tiré certaines ressources politiques, qui leur permettent de participer d’autant plus activement à la réorientation actuelle des débats relatifs à l’action publique dans le domaine agricole en Afrique

Policy support to African Agriculture: New trends or business as usual

African governments have widely acknowledged the important role that the agricultural sector plays to reduce poverty and improve food security. Nonetheless, governments’ stated policy objectives, the policy measures implemented to achieve these objectives and the effects they generate are often not in line. As a result, there are still many ambiguous and inadequately targeted trade and domestic agricultural policies in place aiming to protect certain interest groups, or directed to achieve certain policy goals that come at a cost for specific (non-targeted) groups within the country’s or region’s population. Based on an updated dataset covering the period 2005-2015 for fifteen African countries assembled in the context of the Monitoring and Analysing Food and Agricultural Policies (MAFAP) Project implemented by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations in collaboration with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), this paper proposes new estimates of the scale of distortions, and market inefficiencies and development challenges faced by the agriculture sector at different points of the commodities’ value chains in each country. Distortions to agricultural incentives are captured through the nominal rate of protection (NRP) and nominal rate of assistance (NRA) estimated across commodities for each year. The paper also proposes a first approach to systematically measure and compare market inefficiencies and development challenge in specific value chains through a newly developed indicator called the “Market Development Gap” which is also estimated for each commodity and for each year. Results are characterized by a huge heterogeneity across countries and commodities depending on the net trade position of the country and the status of the commodity. Overall, policy support increases with level of development which is only a confirmation of previous findings