INTERVENTIONS
by Prof. S. C. Nana-Sinkam and Dr. A. Nianp 1
"Nobody should qualify to become a statesman in Africa who is largely ignorant of the problem of the African rural sector"
S.
C. Nana-Sinkarn (Persona! notes)I. INTRODUCTION
Because of neglect by successive governments of the vast potentials of the rural sector, which should have become a sustained source of supply of food and employment, a large proportion of the population in many African countries are in a state of chronic food insecurity. Indeed, as no govern
ment can afford to leave a large majority of its population going to bed hungry most of the time, while giving equal importance to the availability of and access to food, African governments have aimed at achieving self-sufficiency in the production and supply of all the major food items consumed by their population.
However, most of them came to realize that even if self-sufficiency, based on national self-reliance was attainable or sustainable in selected major food items, household access was not often ensured.
Hence, the emphasis was placed on improved food security at national and household levels, based on increased measures of individual household, na
tional and collective self-reliance, within the frame
work of food self-sufficiency and within the context of the major subregional economic groupings.2
Increased self-reliance and improved situation in food security would, however, require the efficient and targeted interventions of governments to help move the economy from the present or projected production-consumption or supply-demand equilib
rium points to higher ones that would ensure a graduated move from food insecurity to food secu
rity for the targeted population. Such interventions, however, would not be achieved without cost to society, that is, they could lead to lower social welfare value as compared to the base case of no specific food security or sustained development projects, policies or measures. Hence, the need to
ensure that appropriate trade-offs between equity, improved food security for all or part of the popula
tion based on increased measures of self-reliance and efficiency in the allocation of resources are developed, notably in the private economy.
The first step in the alleviation of poverty is ensuring household food security, that is year-round access to the food needed for a healthy life of socio-economically deprived and nutritionally vul
nerable groups. In fact, freedom from hunger and malnutrition is to be seen as a right of all citizens and a responsibility of governments. The urgency and scale of food, nutrition and health problems indicate that Africa deserves first priority in the global fight against hunger and malnutrition. Africa is the only continent where the nutritional situation has deteriorated in the last decade.
Also, increased self-reliance and/or food self-suf-ficiency and an improved situation in food security might lead to the over-exploitation of lands including the marginal ones and, thus, negatively affect the environment. Hence, the need to ensure compati
bility between food security goals with sustainable growth and development and the preservation of the natural resource base.
Furthermore, increased collective self-reliance in food security might result in the reallocation of resources within participating countries. However, for cooperation in food security to be sustainable, no participating country, at least in the long run, should become worse off. Cooperation, which should be mutually profitable, should not be consid
ered on a reciprocal basis, that is, sector-against-sector and country-by-country but rather in a system-wide and subregional (all commodities and all countries) framework; it should, therefore, be
1 Prof. S.C. Nana-Sinkam is the Personal Representative of the Director-General of FAO to ECA and OAU and Director of the Joint ECA/FAO Agriculture Division and Dr. A. Niang is Agricultural Economist in the Joint ECA/FAO Agriculture Division.
2 We recognize that in some cases dependence on domestic production as the only source for attaining self-sufficiency may not be economically feasible and/or efficient. This is why, because of the foreign assets constraint, emphasis is placed on the concept of regional and subregional self-sufficiency.
based on production and not on institutions (which have failed to promote cooperation in Africa).
The challenge facing policy analysts at national, subregional and regional levels is, therefore, to provide authoritative advice and information to Af
rican decision makers, individually and collectively, to create and maintain the enabling environment for influencing development, trade and consumption patterns and directing public expenditures through the implementation of a coordinated set of policies, measures, regulations and projects oriented to en
sure the attainment of goals and targets for food security (via food self-sufficiency) that are consis
tent with the objectives of maximizing social wel
fare and sustainable growth and development with transformation in the continent.
Hence, the rationale of this paper focuses on developing a framework for Strategic Planning and Management of Interventions (SPMI) by govern
ments at the national, subregional and regional levels. SPMI is built around four pillars:
the Food Security Commission (FSC) will be a steering force for sustainable growth, self-reliant development and increased self-reliance and im
proved situation in food security in Africa. The Commission will be assisted by Food Security Ad
visors (FSA) and the permanent Food Security Sec
retariat (FSS);
the Goal Oriented Food Security Programming (GOFSP) is a logical framework based on a modified and adapted method of ZOPP. It is an instrument for the FSC to help ensure, at the national, subre-gional and resubre-gional levels, efficient planning and management of the interventions and improved communication between and among public officials and interest groups, including food vulnerable groups. In particular, it will help to bring together a wide range of concerned people to organize and analyze alive the suggested interventions and the role of both the private and public sectors in devel
opment and transformation to attain food security objectives and to help place a value judgement on the actual interventions of governments;
the United Africa Model (UAM) is a set of analytical tools that will help policy analysts to clarify and quantitatively assess the options spelled out during the programming exercise of GOFSP and to undertake the opportunity cost analysis (trade
offs) for adequately guiding decision makers in their choice of food security and sustainable develop
ment strategies, policies, measures and projects.
Hence, as an instrument for GOFSP, it would help the FSC to arrive, by consensus, at a set of selected, alternative, optimal Development and Food Security Programmes (DFSP) from which decision makers would choose. UAM will be a valuable too! for achieving an optimal pattern of development, trade and public expenditures that is consistent with the defined food security goals and targets for the period.
In UAM, the main tools of investigations, for its various components, are a series of mathematical techniques. Mathematical Programming (MP) or a certain type of Social Accounting (SAM). In UAM, the standard method of MP has been modified to ensure a certain degree of compatibility between development objectives, as pursued by the private economic sector and the main objectives of food security based on increased measures of self-reli
ance combined with sustainable growth, develop
ment and transformation. The food security objectives and the requirements for sustainable development with transformation are explicitly modelled. The food security objectives have been introduced as restraints in the standard methods of MP.
Also, the MP method was used to develop opti
mal food baskets for projects related to the gradu
ated move of targeted population from food insecurity to food security. An accounting tech
nique was used for monitoring the evolution of the population from one period to another and capturing and analyzing the activities of the public sector, and
• the Strategies Information Management Sys
tem and Services (SIMSS) which aims to help ensure greater transparency in the targeted inter
ventions and public policy decision making by pro
viding data and information in a standard and simple form for use by all parties concerned.
This investigation was motivated by new devel
opments made in information management sys
tems, communication, computer technology and software, which have opened the road for new and improved tools of strategic management and plan
ning that could be used easily and efficiently at a very low cost, even by non-specialists in modelling and information technology. Above all, the state of development and the situation of food security in many African countries called for strategic planning and management of the interventions to help orient the efforts of both the private and public sectors towards sustainable growth, self-reliant develop
ment with transformation, improved situation in food security and optimal use of scarce resources at national and subregional levels.
Up until now, the analytical work was based on the premise that the existing political systems would perpetuate themselves in the continent and that improvement and transformation of African agricul
ture, the rural sector and, therefore, of its food situation, would have to be managed within that system. Almost no work has been done, so far, on the consequences of market oriented agricultural policies and the implications of those policies on (a) food self-sufficiency and food security for the con
tinent at national, subregional and regional levels, and (b) on trade between African countries and the rest of the world. Our present analysis will concen
trate more on the first aspect.
33
The present paper is divided into four Sections:
Section 1 - the introduction, Section 2 -brief over
view of the challenge posed by the African food situation and perspective, Section 3 -Strategic Plan
ning and Management of Intervention (SPMI), and Section 4 - conclusion.
II. AFRICAN FOOD SITUATION:
THE CHALLENGE AHEAD
The food supply situation in Africa today is an important internal factor in the ongoing reform process and certainly will be considered by the African population at large and more specifically its rural population as an essential yardstick for the success or failure of any meaningful reform. All African political leaders and parties will, therefore, have to put great emphasis on the question of agricultural production for food and trade. The wisdom of this statement is borne out not only by the long neglect of the agricultural and rural sectors in Africa, but more so by recent events which are devastating and marginalizing an entire continent:
desertification, drought, famine, civil strife, political unrest, armed conflicts, tribalism, ethnicism and danism, AIDS, etc.
Signs of food shortages are becoming more and more evident. The problem of short supply is further aggravated by the fact that controlled retail prices on the one hand and increasing incomes on the other hand do not allow the market to find its equilibrium. Where food is distributed through state stores at subsidized prices, the result is inefficient use and even wastage of food, despite overall shortages.
The low standards of post-harvest food-handing lead to huge losses. According to some estimates, about 20 per cent of grain production is spoiled each year due to poor techniques in harvesting, drying, transportation and storage. It would appear that it is easier to import these quantities than to tackle the root of the problems.
Similar insufficiencies exist in the distribution system. The problem has grown to such an extent that financial, industrial and research resources are increasingly being transferred from the military com
plex to the agro-food complex.
From a purely structural point of view, one might expect that African agriculture, with its land en
dowed situation and hard working peasants, is well placed for efficient agricultural production and mar
keting. It seems, however, that sheer existence of these two factors is not the only condition for efficient agriculture. Appropriate market and price signals, the freedom to reinvest the profits from production to tax the sector as well as individual responsibility and incentives are of no less impor
tance. The latter aspect is of special importance in agriculture, where the results of a particular year may completely depend upon very swift decision
making or appropriate policy.
On top of the above problems, African agriculture has to face the following serious problems of soil fertility, which are largely due to inappropriate pro
duction methods and long neglect of the sector:
• loss of organic substance;
• inadequate nutrient composition;
• inadequate irrigation (quality and quantity of water), and
• soil erosion.
A. Are there conditions for change for the better?
The conditions for change for the better, to paraphrase someone who spent much of his career as a minister for agriculture, could be described as follows:3
give farmers control of their own land on a secure basis;
introduce "equivalent" trade between agricul
ture and the rest of the economy and between town and country (this equivalence is not defined, and there is no clear commitment to any practical course of action);
• switch from interventionist to democratic man
agement of the sector, on the basis of initiatives and decisions by basic production units;
• ensure a major improvement in rural infrastruc
ture, and
implement radical improvement of living and working conditions in the rural areas.
As in other political fields, much will depend upon the speed with which further liberalization can be introduced. The most delicate question will be how to change from the present economic system with heavily subsidized consumer prices to a market economy. Agricultural reforms which would change the allocation of subsidies or reduce their level but which were not accompanied by improve
ments in production on the farm and in the food sector would further aggravate the food supply situation and exacerbate social and political prob
lems.
3 Mr. M. Gorbachev, former President of the former USSR..
In view of the huge problems which have to be solved by a process of reform, it seems inevitable that such reform cannot be achieved with one sweep but will be the result of "trial and error" and the competition of ideas and concepts. This is best seen in the ongoing debate, as to whether privati
zation and land reforms or state farms are best suited to solve the food problem.
African countries have the natural capacity to be large and efficient agricultural producers:
per capita consumption indicates that any possible increase in production would be absorbed for some time by the increased demand in the countries themselves or on the continent;
production figures indicate that an increase in production to a non-negligible level does not neces
sitate the invention of new production techniques, but rather the proper application of those existing and easily available, the empowering of rural people;
* the downgrading of agriculture in East Euro
pean countries is due to the political and economic turmoil and the total neglect of the rural and food sectors, which have prevailed in some countries for more than 30 years;
* it seems, therefore, unrealistic to assume that things can change for the better in the short term.
The damage, in terms of psycho-sociological barri
ers, inadequate rural development and infrastruc
ture, loss of professionalism in farming and lack of entrepreneurship is too large to allow rapid overall results, and
* having destroyed the family farm at the rural level, which has been the basis for rapid agricultural development in Africa before independence in the 1960s, without a large supply of capital from the non-farm sector, which has exploited the agricul
tural sector for the past 30 years mainly through taxation, most African countries will be obliged to continue to run large farms and accept that invest
ment capital will not come from the austerity of hardworking rural peasants but will have to be provided by injections from outside the farm sector, especially through targeted and time limited produc
tion subsidies.
B. Possible effects on agricultural trade If policy reform in African countries and neces
sary changes in the economy as well as in agricul
tural policies were to be successful, one could assume that agricultural production would grow faster than in the past. In overall terms, the growth of supply would be accompanied, for some time at least, by an equally growing internal demand for food. Since food supply levels as well as income are relatively low, one can assume that the income elasticity of demand for food products would be rather high. Therefore, most of the increased agri
cultural production would be absorbed by an in
crease in demand.
Increasing demand for animal products (beef, pork, dairy and poultry products, fish), in particular will cause an increase in the use of cereals and cereal substitutes. It, therefore, seems likely that many African countries will continue to remain net food importers in global terms for quite some time.
In the short and medium term, the political necessity to demonstrate to the consumer that reform meas
ures do have positive effects on food supply may even make it necessary for some countries to speed up imports of agricultural products. This situation should have a positive feedback on intra-African trade in agricultural products and, thus, reduce the present tension amongst the major exporters.
If reforms were to become a real success story and if African countries were to increase their global self-sufficiency beyond 100 per cent, then some of the historical trade patterns of the 1960s might reappear in the longer term.
In such a case, agriculture in some member States would have to face growing competition from internal and external markets. However, even under this optimistic outlook (from the point of view of African countries), the overall consequences for West European, North American and Australian agriculture and its food industry would not be disastrous. For the foreseeable future, the West European countries. North America and Australia will probably keep their comparative advantage in the production of high-quality food, notably proc
essed food. African countries may, therefore, bene
fit in the medium and longer term from the increasing demand for high-quality processed food, which would result from possible growth of the economies of African countries.
The above global scenario leaves the impression that everything could be fine in African trade in agricultural products. That may, however, not nec
essarily be the case for a number of reasons:
Firstly, food prices in Africa are amongst the highest in the world. African countries will, there
fore, try to sell whatever they can in order to earn hard currency. That is particularly the case for countries which already have a certain place on EIC markets. Since many products no longer benefit from preferential arrangements, much will depend on the future evolution of exchange rates and the outcome of the present General Agreement on
fore, try to sell whatever they can in order to earn hard currency. That is particularly the case for countries which already have a certain place on EIC markets. Since many products no longer benefit from preferential arrangements, much will depend on the future evolution of exchange rates and the outcome of the present General Agreement on