State Fragility and African Agriculture

MOBILISING EUROPEAN RESEARCH FOR DEVELOPMENT POLICIES

STATE FRAGILITY AND AFRICAN AGRICULTUREShailaja Fennell, ERD-Team member, University of Cambridge

Paper prepared for the Conference on “Moving Towards the European Report on Development 2009”, organised by the European Report on Development in Florence, Italy, 21-23 June, 2009.

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ABSTRACTThis paper examines the characteristics of African development that have emerged from the conventional approach to looking at agriculture as a contributor to development. The consequences of examining African agriculture and identifying its characteristics variously as a sectoral contribution to GDP, a provider of employment and its ability to support a rural population, the source of food and raw materials, and the site of entrepreneurial skill, will all be analysed. The prognosis that emerges from this established perspective is that African agriculture has not been very successful in ensuring economic development. With regard to the relationship between agriculture and security, a more recent set of paradigms that focus on agriculture as a site, rather than a source, have emerged, and this paper examines how these provide new opportunities to examine agriculture security linkages to reduce contexts of state fragility.

The paper begins by reviewing the depiction of African agriculture in the traditional literature to identify the causes of agricultural instability and agricultural crisis. Section 2 asks how the new literature on state fragility can be linked to agricultural development to develop a typology of agricultural policies. Section 3 reviews the impact of land reform and land re-distribution on agricultural production and confl ict. Section 4 examines how the introduction of social safety-nets and social protection could reduce risk and vulnerability in contexts of rural poverty. Section 5 traces the linkages between food security and newer concepts of vulnerability and resilience. Section 6 focuses on how the institutional initiatives undertaken by the EU in the area of food security and agriculture in Africa have created new opportunities and challenges in reducing food insecurity and state fragility.

Keywords: Africa, agriculture, State fragility, land reform, safety nets, vulnerability, resilience, food security, European Union.

Shailaja FennellERD-Team member, University of Cambridge

e-mail: [email protected]

STATE FRAGILITY AND AFRICAN AGRICULTURE

The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors, and should not be taken to be the views of the European Report on Development, of the European Commission or of the European Union Member States.


1 Introduction This concept note will examine the contribution of agriculture to economic development, as well as its implications for ensuring political stability within the nation state. Of these two linkages, the more established and well-researched area is that of the role of agri-culture in development, while far less is known about the role of agriculture in relation to political stability or national security.

Figure 1 shows the linkages between (i) agriculture and development as an arrow with bold lines going from agriculture to development, between (ii) agriculture and secu-rity as a single headed arrow with dotted lines going from the former to the latter and (iii) between development and security as a double headed arrow with dashed lines. In the past, the arrow between agriculture and development provided the primary perspec-tive for evaluating the role of agriculture in the development process.

Diagram 1: Linking Agriculture to Development and Security

Agriculture

Develop-ment

Security

This paper will examine the characteristics of African development that have emerged from the conventional approach to looking at agriculture as a contributor to develop-ment. It will examine the challenges and the perscriptions that emerge from this ap-proach to understanding the role of agriculture in African development. The conse-quences of examining African agriculture and identifying its characteristics variously as: a sectoral contribution to GDP, a provider of employment and its ability to support a ru-ral population, the source of food and raw materials, and the site of entrepreneurial skill,1 will all be analysed. The prognosis that emerges from this established perspective is that African agriculture has not been very successful in ensuring economic develop-ment. With regard to the relationship between agriculture and security, a more recent set of paradigms that focus on agriculture as a site, rather than a source, have emerged, in which it is seen as a basis for livelihoods, a source of traditional- and community- 1 The contribution of agriculture and the change in the sector as economic development is

achieved from the core of economic development models through the second half of the Twen-tieth century. The Lewis model (Lewis 1954) focuses on the labour contribution of cheap and plentiful labour for industrialisation, while Simon Kuznets identified the characteristics of an economy achieving “modern economic growth” as one that moved away from relying on a large production and employment contribution from agriculture to one that would rely far more on the industrial and service sectors (Kuznets 1966). The classic economic models of the role of agriculture are found in established development texts, such as Ghatak and Ingersent (1986) and Eicher and Staadtz (1996).

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based knowledge, as providing a set of social norms and identities to rural populations, and this paper examines how these might provide new opportunities that could operate through the agriculture security linkages to reduce contexts of state fragility.

The paper will identify the various junctures at which crises have arisen in African ag-riculture and their implications for state fragility. Section 1 will look at agricultural pro-duction, productivity, ecologies and trade, in relation to the emergence of agricultural instability as an indicator of agricultural crisis in this literature; Section 2 will examine how the new literature on state fragility can be related to agricultural policy, and will de-velop a typology of agricultural policies using this literature; Section 3 will review the importance of land reform and re-distribution on agricultural production and conflict; Section 4 will examine the emergence of social safety-nets and social protection as agendas that address the problem of rural poverty and collapsing livelihoods through reducing risk and vulnerability; Section 5 will examine the food security literature and the implications of the inter-actions between vulnerability and resilience: Section 6 will look at new regional and international initiatives in institution-building in agriculture and focus on how the institutional initiatives undertaken by the EU in the area of food secu-rity and agriculture in Africa have created new opportunities and challenges in reducing food insecurity and state fragility.

2 The Characteristics of African Agriculture To achieve self-sufficiency in food production has been a long-standing objective of Afri-can governments. Countries have declared a long-term objective in increasing produc-tion and focussed on increasing agricultural productivity, through improvements in both input efficiency and technological advancement (Nkameleu 2003). Notwithstanding this objective, agricultural production and productivity have not risen sharply.

2.1 Production and Productivity The gains in agricultural production have, in fact, been small, with output growing at an average of 1.8 percent between 1964-1983 (Pratt and Yu 2008). The trends in African agriculture appear to be consistent with the growth trends across sub-Saharan econo-mies,2 showing that there was little growth until the mid-1980s. African agricultural pro-duction is beset by input constraints: poor soils, too little irrigation, not enough high-yielding seed, and inadequate inorganic fertiliser, draught power, and credit3 have all been put forward as reasons for a low growth rate and for falling productivity.4

2 Trend growth declined until the late 1980s and increased thereafter, alongside a decline in the

variance from mid-1990s (Arbache 2008). 3 Limited and low quality inputs are a severe obstacle to African agriculture: Africa suffers from

low soil fertility which contributes to low productivity of African production systems (Donovan and Casey 1998; Scoones 2001); irrigation is another severe constraint as only 5 million hec-tares, 4.9 per cent of the total cultivated area, of which more than 3 million hectares of this ir-rigated land is in two countries — Madagascar and the Sudan - is irrigated (Wiggins 2000).

4 There is a contrast between trends in Africa, and those in Asia and Latin America, with a de-cline in per capita food production since the 1960s in the former, while the food output for all developing economies increased between the 1970s and 1990s (McCalla 1999, Gabre-Mahdin and Haggblade 2004).


Graph 1: African Cereal Yields in comparison with Other Regions

Source: WDI indicators, 2009

Graph 1 on yields shows that crop yields in Sub-Saharan Africa have grown slower than the yield trends in other regions of the world. Studies show that agricultural pro-ductivity in Sub-Saharan Africa have languished: Block (1995) estimated that agricul-tural TFP was -0.5 per cent per year (for 1973-78) to 1.6 per cent per year (for 1983-88); Lusigi and Thirtle (1997) estimate TFP growth of 1.3 per cent per year for 47 Afri-can countries during the period 1961-91; Evenson and Dias Avila (2007) estimate that the productivity growth of 37 African countries was 1.68 per cent from 1981 to 2001, rising from 1.20 per cent for the preceding two decades, 1961-1980. Though there was some recovery in the 1980s, Trueblood and Coggins (2003) show that, while selected countries improved their performance, the regional aggregate productivity declined by an average of 0.9 percent in the countries in SSA; Coelli and Rao (2005) identified that there were only six African countries with TFP growth above 2 per cent during the 1980–2000 period (Burundi, Angola, Nigeria, Ghana, Malawi, and Senegal).

While the growth of agricultural output remains a desired objective in Sub-Saharan African countries, the growth that has occurred has not resulted in a reduction in insta-bility. Instead, instability in production is emerging as a major source of both food shortages and unpredictability regarding future food prospects. This has led to a calcula-tion of instability indices through an examination of the co-efficient of the variation (C.V.) of the variable concerned (Hazell, 1982; Mehra, 1981). Some studies have pre-ferred to use the adjusted co-efficient of the variation or the Cuddy-Della Valle index (Cuddy and Della Valle 1978), which measures the variation in a trend line for the period (Singh and Byerlee 1990; Singh and Tabatabai 1993). More recently, instability indices which are based upon mean absolute error and mean square error of the estimate of the semi-logarithmic trend equation for the relevant dependent variable have been pro-posed.5 The graphs below show that growth rates remain under one per cent across Af-rican regions. Interestingly, the instability indicators are higher in the more agriculturally advanced regions of Southern and Western Africa than Eastern and Middle Africa, in sig-nalling that growth in a region has not resulted in reduced instability over the last four decades.

5 See Kueh 1994 on the use of Coppock Index, which is essentially a mean absolute error-based

index; Naylor, Falcon and Zavaleta 1997, for a mean square error-based index.

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Graph 1: Trend Growth Rates and Instability (1962-2007) for Southern Africa

Southern Africa: Trend Growth Rates and Instability (1962-2007)

00.5

11.5

22.5

33.5

4

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

Growth Rate (%)

Inst

abili

ty In

dex

(%) Rice, paddy

WheatMaizeMillet SorghumSugar caneTea

Graph 2: Trend Growth Rates and Instability (1962-2007) for Eastern Africa

Eastern Africa: Trend Growth Rates and Instability (1962-2007)

00.20.40.60.8

11.21.41.61.8

2

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2

Growth Rate (%)

Inst

abili

ty In

dex

(%)

Rice, paddyWheatMaizeMillet SorghumYamsCassavaSugar caneCocoa beansCoffee, greenTea

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Graph 3: Growth Trend Rates and Instability (1962-2007) for Middle Africa

Middle Africa: Trend Growth Rates and Instability (1962-2007)

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2

Growth Rate (%)

Inst

abili

ty In

dex

(%)

Rice, paddyWheatMaizeMillet SorghumYamsCassavaSugar caneCocoa beansCoffee, greenTea

Graph 4: Trend Growth Rates and Instability (1962-2007) for Northern Africa

Northern Africa: Trend Growth Rates and Instability (1962-2007)

00.5

11.5

22.5

33.5

44.5

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2

Growth Rate (%)

Inst

abili

ty In

dex

(%) Rice, paddy

WheatMaizeMillet SorghumYamsCassavaSugar caneSugar beet

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Graph 5: Trend Growth Rates and Instability (1962-2007) for Western Africa

Western Africa: Trend Growth Rates and Instability (1962-2007)

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

3.5

4

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

Growth Rate (%)

Inst

abili

ty In

dex

(%)

Rice, paddyWheatMaizeMillet SorghumYamsCassavaSugar caneCocoa beansCoffee, greenTea (1975-2007)

Africa also seems to have been trapped in a vicious circle in relation to possible ways forward in improving input usage. On the one hand, while fertiliser is found to have posi-tive effect on agricultural output (Larson and Frisvold 1996; Ike, 1977), Henao and Baanante (2006) have noticed that fertiliser use in Africa is less than 10 per cent of that in Asia. On the other hand, although intensive use of fertiliser has increased yields, it has also resulted in very large increases in water consumption in areas that already have a water shortage (Gommes and Petrassi, 1994). There has also been limited use of new agricultural technologies to transform agricultural production,6 and the continued difficulties in improving input returns point to the inability of African agriculture to adopt any further intensification policies.

2.2 Trade and agricultural performance An alternative strategy for success in African agriculture would be the possibility of de-vising diversification strategies, through specialising in tradeable crops. The low level of diversity in agricultural production is reflected in the traded share of agricultural com-modities in Sub-Saharan Africa, where there has been a fall in the share of agricultural exports in total exports of goods and services between 1990 to 2002-04 accompanied by a rise of agricultural imports over the same period (Sarris and Rapsomanikis 2009). The implications of continuing to produce an export basket made up wholly of primary com-modities that face volatile world prices point are most negatively felt by the poorer sec-tions of society as they are least able to protect themselves from drastic price changes. Such a policy consequently reduces the pro-poor focus of economic policies (Guillaumont and Korachais 2006, Collier and Goderis 2006).

The potential impact of a growing food import basket on hunger and vulnerability de-pends on the extent to which poor households are exposed to the international market.

6 Multifactor productivity analysis assessing the impact of the potential determining factors (in-

cluding science and technology) on agricultural output has shown that, in Sub-Saharan Africa, R&D investment elasticity (i.e., the share of output growth due to R&D) did not exceed 5 per cent (Frisvold and Ingram, 1995; Thirtle, Hadley and Townsend, 1995), and was often barely significant (Chema, Gilbert and Roseboom 2003). In contrast, the paper by Craig, Pardey, and Roseboom (1997) revealed the R&D elasticity in the range of 10 per cent, and, if only develop-ing countries were considered, the R&D elasticity remained as high as 9 per cent.

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While institutional dualism controls the inter-action between agriculture and the rest of the economy, as well as between the subsistence and market-oriented households in agriculture, the insulation brought about by institutional features from the international economy can make poor households more vulnerable to domestic agricultural income and natural shocks. On the other hand, greater exposure to the international markets could cause poor households to be faced by dwindling prospects of income accompanied by rising food prices. The implications of such exposure for food security in African coun-tries which are increasingly becoming food importers of the major cereal crops are a new matter for concern in relation to future food insecurity.7

The current resurgence of concern about the adverse conditions in agricultural trade has been within the context of a recent round of higher food prices. This has also taken place within a longer period from the 1990s to the present day, widely acknowledged to be a period of relatively tight global supply and demand of food, resulting in a highly inelastic demand response, compounded by the domestic conditions in which the supply curves of land, labour and capital continue to be far more inelastic in agriculture than in industry, particularly in the context of a cyclical downturn. The combination creates a further source of potential collapse of the agricultural sector in the face of the existing institutional arrangements which manage agricultural production and trade.

In the African context, identifying the price transmission mechanism by which inter-national food prices have an impact on domestic food markets provides an important way forward to ascertain how international price increases could adversely affect food security. Where domestic policies which insulate domestic producers and consumers ex-ist, the transmission mechanisms might be partial or very slow in its impact. In the cases of maize markets in Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, Uganda and Zambia it has been found that price transmission between international and domestic markets is not com-plete. The reason for this phenomenon is the existence of decided domestic preferences for white maize (domestically grown) over yellow maize (sold on international markets). This specificity resulted in the price transmission being protracted to between five to nine months after the initial price shock. This was particularly noticeable in the case of Kenya, where the markets of Kisimu and Eldoret do not appear to have been affected by international or South African price shocks in the short run, but do feel the price shocks after a period of six to nine months. As both the Kisimu and Eldoret districts were the site of recent ethnic-related clashes, and food insecurity was a potential concern in 2008, such research could provide a way forward to supporting rural households who were the net purchasers of food (Sarris and Rapsomanikis 2009).

The World Bank LICUS (Low Income Countries Under Stress) classification, which was introduced in 2002-03 to identify countries characterised by “weak policies, institutions, and governance”, uses two criteria to define core and severe LICUS: (i) per capita in-come within the threshold of International Development Association (IDA) eligibility, and (ii) a CPIA (Country Performance and Institutional Assessment) (World Bank 2006), which indicates that, in the African LICUS (that do not obtain a large share of national income from oil revenues), more than 60 per cent of the population and more than 25 per cent of the GDP continues to come from the primary sector (Alinovi and Russo 2009). The continued prominence of agriculture in these fragile countries, and the inabil-ity to shift the economy towards a more diversified sectoral structure, in the presence of severe institutional capacity constraints is an additional indication that a reduction in food production could trigger fragility, particularly in the absence of a strong domestic drive to maintain agricultural exports.

7 The FAO COSIMO model for LDC Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) makes projections, based upon cur-

rent estimates, that LDC SSA will become an increasing food deficit region in wheat and rice, while in the coarse grain sector, including maize, millet and sorghum, it will be self-sufficient (Sarris and Rapsonikis 2009).


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The production approach to agricultural production has identified input-constraints: poor soils, too little irrigation, not enough high-yielding seed, and inadequate inorganic fertiliser, draught power, and credit, highlighting the supply-side constraints that con-tribute to a low growth-rate and falling productivity. While this supply-side view ad-vances the argument that it is the misuse of natural resources, due to poor knowledge levels, faulty techniques and inadequate insurance from natural and human disasters, which is responsible for the phenomena of desertification and de-forestation, there are other paradigms that focus on the nature, ownership and management of the resources, and the related environments themselves.8

2.3 Ecologies There are six major ecologies in Sub-Saharan agriculture: desert, arid, semi-arid, semi-humid, humid, and highlands. These ecologies vary in relation to the prevalence of water and, in particular, irrigation, the nature of soils, and the height above sea level. The variation in ecology is not merely from district to district, for the soil and water condi-tions change from village to village, field to field, and even across a single field (Olivier de Sardan 2008). This very localised ecology makes it difficult to cultivate cereals on large tracts (due to the variations in soil type and nutrients) and/or to conduct uniform agricultural operations (such as irrigation and pesticides across the field), and results in smallholdings, in which the smallholders place greater emphasis on root crops such as cassava and yams (which can be grown in small batches in accordance with the soil type) (Gabre-Magdin and Haggblade 2003). Roots and tubers provide a major source of sustenance, which accounts for 20 per cent of the calories consumed in the region (Rosegrant et al., 2000: 1) and also provide the basis of the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in Africa (Ochieng 2007).9

There are also variations visible in recent years in relation to both production and productivity trends across broad regions: North Africa, Western Africa, Central Africa, Eastern Africa, and Southern Africa,10 and it is not just the crop composition that varies across regions. The trends in production also show different trajectories. Graphs 6-11 on production show the variations across regions. It is interesting to note that wheat, maize and millet output has been far more variable and have shown an absolute decline in the last few years in the case of Middle Africa (comprising Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and São Tomé and Principe) than in Eastern Africa (comprising Burundi, Comoros, Kenya, Madgascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozamibique, Réunion, Rwanda, the Seychelles, Somalis, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe), but surprisingly are marginally better in performance than Southern Africa (comprising Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland).

Bromley (2008) points out the critical importance of ecology in Africa in determining not just the production and productivity, for, while the increasing use of fertiliser has increased yields, which shows the possibility of improvement for African farmers, the real answers lie in understanding how the state is dealing with agriculture. In the last

8 Leach and Mearns (1996) point out that technical expertise and institutional settings within

which it is produced, i.e., research organisations, government departments, and aid donors, disregard, or under-rate local knowledge and impose their narrow vision on the methods to be adopted in agricultural production systems.

9 It is interesting to note that roots and tubers were not included in the Green Revolution tech-nologies devised under the auspices of the CGIAR in the 1970s. Millet has gained importance in the international research programmes since the 1990s, but roots and tubers do not have an equal weighting in international agricultural research and policy programmes devised for Africa (Nweke 2004).

10 This classification is that of the World Bank; the FAO uses the regions Middle, Eastern, Western and Southern Africa in its data classification.


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decade, it has emerged that a serious difficulty faced by African economies is that the nature of the problems faced by agriculture have often been inaccurately diagnosed, and mis-identification of the nature of the underlying problem has resulted in policy re-sponses that have been inappropriate or have even exacerbated the existing weakness (Alinovi 2009).

The underlying weaknesses of African agriculture emerge from both short-term and long-term problems, and these have continued to dog these countries for over forty years. While short-term economic imbalances require financial measures, such as de-valuing the currency and increasing the interest rate to improve trade and resource mo-bilisation respectively, long-term problems need structural changes to change agricul-tural investment patterns and to provide incentives to structures that can ensure greater employment of rural labour, and better resource flows between rural and urban sec-tors.11 The current condition of agriculture in African economies indicates that this prom-ise has remained an empty one, as the share of employment in agriculture among the less developed countries in Africa only decreased from 83 per cent to 71 per cent be-tween 1974 and 2005 (Sarris and Rapsomanikis 2009) and agriculture continues to rep-resent 34 per cent of Africa’s GDP (World Bank, 2008). Another major reason for the continued emphasis on cereal production as the single solution for ensuring rural liveli-hoods in African countries is a myopic vision that only looks at the present day context. The lack of, or inadequate, attention to ecological specificities in African agriculture of such a limited view of agriculture prevents policy makers from taking on board tradi-tional systems of resource management and indigenous knowledge systems that could expand livelihood opportunities outside the conventional agricultural paradigm (Scoones and Devereaux 2005; Binswanger 2008; Diao et.al.2006).

It would African agriculture does appear to have three different faces - those who benefit from the market, the smallholder, and those who are pushed off the agricultural ladder (World Bank 2008) – yet there is still inadequate attention paid to the mecha-nisms that bring about these three states of the agricultural world within the African continent. There are also concerns that the recent growth performance in African agri-culture should not be regarded as directly comparable with that of Asia or Latin America. For, while agriculture has grown largely through the expansion of cultivated land (Henao and Baanante, 2006), the low population density increases transportation and transac-tion costs, makes it more difficult for competitive markets to emerge, and makes it costly to provide agricultural and social services (Hayami and Platteau, 1998).12 Herbst (2000) points to the differing population densities between Africa and Western Europe, with Africa only obtaining levels comparable with Sixteenth century Europe by 1975. In addition, the marked differences across these regions of the developing world raise questions about the likelihood of success in transferring models from other regions to the African agricultural environment (Diao et al., 2006).13 While agriculture does appear to have three different faces - those who benefit from the market, the smallholder and those who are pushed off the agricultural ladder (World Bank, 2008) - the mechanisms 11 Graphs 12-13 indicate that there is high instability of trade in cereals and far less in cash crops,

yet the growth rates for trade in cash crops remains low restricting the possibility of diversifica-tion in Western and Southern Africa.

12 Binswanger and Townsend have argued that, rather than increasing transaction costs and the difficulties for competitive markets to emerge, it is the inability of sparse agricultural popula-tions to form sufficiently strong political and institutional influence that has become one of ma-jor reasons in explaining poor agricultural growth, as argued by Lipton (1977).

13 The limited usefulness of the Asian model of agricultural development for African economies, due to the differences in ecologies, types of agrarian relations and land ownership, have also been the subject of much research (see Doward 2002). There is rapidly growing literature on the impact of environmental degradation on African agriculture (Barrios, Ouattara and Strobl, 2008; Molua 2008). A review of the literature on the limitations of production approaches in agriculture in dealing with environmental concerns can be found in Scoones, Devereaux and Haddad (2005).


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that bring about these three states in the agricultural world could also have national speficities within the African continent.

3 Locating State Fragility in African Agriculture The relationship between security and development remains difficult to identify, as there remain unresolved questions of ownership relating to the domain and direction of such terms, i.e., “whose” security and development is being discussed, and in what context (Buerger and Vennesson 2009). In addition, the nature and content of these relation-ships differs at global, national and local levels. While the challenges posed by these overarching terminologies, as well as the manner in which the terminologies are used by international, state and civil society actors have been discussed at a national level, they also have a particular importance for agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa, where agricul-ture still provides livelihoods for 64 per cent the population and 34 per cent of Africa’s GDP (World Bank, 2008).

3.1 New learning on the African State and Agriculture Stewart and Brown (2009) provide a characterisation of state fragility in relation to the three dimensions of authority failure, service failure and legitimacy failure. In this analy-sis, authority failure occurs when the state lacks the authority to protect its citizens from violence: political, sub-national, communal or criminal. In the instance where there is service failure, the state becomes unable to ensure basic services, particularly in the ar-eas of health services, basic education, water and sanitation, basic transport and energy infrastructure, and poverty reduction and destitution. In the situation of legitimacy fail-ure, the state lacks legitimacy due to only limited support among its citizens, and is of-ten associated with a dominant military presence in government, and limited, or an ab-sence of, democratic features, such as elections, an active opposition, media freedom, and civil and political liberties.

The ability of the state to provide protection, basic services, and civil and political freedoms are, therefore, the hallmarks of a capable state. Furthermore, such a state would function through a social contract (see Buerger and Vennesson for a review of the importance of the social contract in the European literature). It follows from this that a modern state would also regard itself as being subject to a fiscal contract, for the most part explicitly in relation to the power of taxation being evidence of political representa-tion (Hyden 2008). Indeed, the legitimate right to tax is an indication of the capacity of the state to carry out developmental goals (Brautigaum 2008). The magnitude and the type of taxation regimes instituted by the state have significant implications for the sys-tem of production and distribution that operate in the economy.

While it is valuable to identify the characteristics of state capacity, and, by inference, those of incapacity or fragility, this process should not be based upon an idealised notion of the state. Olivier de Sardan (2008) makes the point that western researchers do not “work with the grain” in understanding African institutions and governance; instead, they use Western models of state institutions. The straitjacketing of African state institu-tions, as well as its relation to non-state and civil society institutions, have imposed a European style social contract on societies that have had very different social and politi-cal structures: the importance of the collective and the community, rather than the nu-clear family, the central role of reciprocity, and, consequently, the value accorded to group identity, including ethnicity (Kelsall 2009). This overlaying of the external para-digms of state institutions has also resulted in preferential weighting being awarded to formal, rather than informal, institutions, as they accorded more closely to the “modern-ist” notions of rule of law being superior to social norms, and the preference among in-ternational development agencies for ensuring a separation of politics from policy in or-der to ensure “governance” and to minimise “corruption” (Manor 2008).


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Both the structure and the actions of African states need to be understood on their own terms. This approach is also more appropriate for understanding both the system and the degree of social stratification in a society, and its implications for group de-mands for economic resources and claims for political patronage (Knight 1990). In this regard, the rise of the middle class provides a basis for the creation of independent wealth, as they might harness the development process (Hyden, 2009: 17).

3.2 State Fragility and Agricultural Policy While there is little reference made to either agriculture, or the policies or actions under-taken therein, within the state fragility literature, it is possible to extrapolate how this new framework might be located in the agricultural context. Hyden (2008: 19) suggests distinguishing between capacity for development and capacity to respond to change as a way of understanding the reach of the power of the African state. If a state has low ca-pacity for development, but is responsive to change (Hyden differentiates between Bot-swana, which is strong in both capacities, and Tanzania, which is only strong in the ca-pacity to respond to change), it might be pushed into making service provision. While, if a country has a strong capacity for development, but is weak in its capacity to respond (the case identified by Hyden is that of Ethiopia), this could reduce its legitimacy to de-liver policy. The differentiation of institutional capacity suggested by Hyden appears to equate a high capacity for development with the ability of the state to create new agri-cultural policies and legal frameworks. On the other hand, a high capacity to respond is identified with re-formulating programmes and implementation. The possibility of draw-ing on the capacity for development and the capacity to respond as indicators of the variation in the institutional capacity of the state into an analysis of state fragility could provide a way to integrate agricultural performance into our current understanding of state failure.

The suggestions made by Hyden permit an expansion of the Stewart and Brown (SB) framework, which, currently, while being very useful in identifying types of failure, does not go far enough in its interrogation of the realm of institutional capacity.14 In particu-lar, the bringing of insitutitional capacities into the SB framework would be helpful in or-der to understand the types of failure in relation to the capacity for development and the capacity to respond to change among domestic actors. This could be particularly useful with regard to analysing the key figures in the Ministry of Agriculture, who direct policies and own processes, and whose performance is critical to successful service delivery (Cabral and Scoones 2006). It is equally valuable to gain an institutional understanding of the reasons for the unsustainability of new agricultural policies, in this case, smart subsidies in Malawi, in the face of pressure to maintain political alliances (Chinsinga 2007a, 2007b). The manner in which these capacities for development and responses to change interact with the various component parts of authority, service delivery and le-gitimacy may also vary across state institutions.

Diagram 2 provides a typology that links the institutional dimension to state failure. There is no attempt to create an aggregate measure of state capacity across types of institutional capacity. The diagram is also a simplification of the real world, as it does not take into account the possibility of interconnectedness between institutional components of authority, service delivery and legitimacy. Consequently, it is only the starting point for bringing in institutional analysis in order to evaluate the formulation and delivery of agricultural policy. The model could also be expanded by bringing in additional, distinct or conjoint, attributes of state fragility to the current categories, such as the importance of public security as measured through government spending that has been undertaken

14 Stewart and Brown (2009:5) evaluate the existing donor approaches to fragile states and iden-

tify institutional capacity as central to the World Bank and CIDA frameworks. However, these do not begin with the specificities of state-society relations, which might be better gauged us-ing the EC framework on working with a form of the social contract.


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in a recent study that showed that a higher level of state spending of security improves agricultural productivity (Bryceson et al., 2009).

Diagram 2: Fragility Attributes and the Reach of Power

Authority Failure Service Failure Legitimacy Failure Capacity to Develop Case 1

Property rights reform but not enforceable

Case 2 Irrigation, Electricity but poor quality

Case 3 Land reform but elites take over of land

Capacity to Respond Case 4 General agricultural sub-sidies

Case 5 Fiscal Transfers but poor transmission

Case 6 Administrative strait-jacketed safety nets

Source: Adapted from Stewart and Brown (2009) and Hyden (2009)

Diagram 2 brings together the SB categories of state failure and the Hyden identifica-tion of the reach of the power of the state. The benefit of such a conjoining is that the reach of the state permits a policy dimension (of action) to be introduced into the more outcome-based SB framework. The realm of actions of the state are circumscribed by whether they have the capacity to develop, indicated by the provision of developmental goods, or only the capacity to respond, indicated by the formulation and/or amendment of administrative policy. The outcomes of state action in the SB framework can be differ-entiated by the type of failure with regard to meeting development demands, i.e., au-thority failure results in poor enforcement of goods provision and policies, service deliv-ery failure produces weak implementation, and legitimacy failure prevents full coverage of the relevant population by both provision and policy measures. Using this differentia-tion, Diagram 2 provides a typology of the kinds of policies and programmes that a state with particular weaknesses and capacities can provide in relation to the development needs and specific demands of groups in agriculture.

In Case 1, in which the state has the capacity to develop, but suffers from authority failure, new agricultural programmes provided by the state in response to demands from agricultural groups will be undermined by the inability of the state to protect its citizens. This could result in a widespread fear among farmers regarding their ability to protect their land and their crops in the field. The fear of theft of crops, or attacks on their land and property, would make them reluctant to participate in the new programmes.15 If the state only had the capacity to respond, then it would resort to administrative changes in order to respond to agricultural demands. The response would be not be targeted, as the state suffers from authority failure and cannot assure the protection of any particular group, and would, therefore, take the form of some type of generic untargeted subsidies to the entire sector (Case 4). Such subsidies are unlikely to increase agricultural produc-tion or productivity, but are more in the nature of a re-distribution policy in response to political demands.16

In the combination (Case 2), in which the state had the capacity to develop and there were demands for agricultural programmes, the state would provide agricultural services such as irrigation and electricity, but these would be of a poor quality due to service fail-ure. The state does have the ability to produce and provide these services, but falls short in regularity and quality of delivery. In the situation (Case 5), in which the state has the capacity to respond but there is a problem of service failure, there would be no new production of services. Instead, the amendments to the provision of services would continue to suffer from poor transmission, on account of service failure, resulting in very

15 The creation of new rural development frameworks such as Special Rural Economic Zones

might prove too risky if farmers cannot be sure that their property and crops will protected by the state.

16 The use of agricultural subsidies as an instrument to redistribute funds among powerful rural groups has been regularly observed in the case of South Asia. See Raj Krishna on the nature of rural subsidies, also Gulati and Narayanan on the consequences for Indian agriculture.


15

low returns on such initiatives. The poor record of agricultural technology dissemination through state technology institutions falls into this category of failure.

In Case 3, in which the state has the capacity to develop but there is legitimacy fail-ure, the state response to demands made by rural groups which would not sustain a systemic agricultural reform programme for the land, and agricultural resources would be captured by élite and powerful groups. This would result in a loss of ownership rights to land among subordinate rural groups, leading to intra-state conflicts. In Case 6, the state has the capacity to respond, but suffers from legitimacy failure, the amendments to agricultural programmes would be not be available to subordinate or minority rural groups and could be another source of inter-group conflict. In this context, the situation of intra-state wars due to land-based conflict needs to be distinguished from those that arise due to conflicts over natural resources, as natural resources are far easier to usurp and have a far higher value-added than agricultural land and its ensuing products.17 However, in Africa both land ownership and lesser forms of land rights, such as land ti-tling, have emerged as contentious matters in recent years, often building on an existing set of unmet claims regarding land reform and re-distribution policies previously con-ducted by the state in Africa. Land reform has been at the heart of nationalist policies in Africa (most famously, the Ujaama system brought into Tanzania as part of a socialist land re-distribution policy in the 1970s). It was at the core of nationalist politics, most spectacularly in the Mau-Mau armed demands for land in Kenya, and enshrined in many national constitutions in Africa. In more recent decades, land reform and re-distribution policies have been announced, and, to varying degrees, implemented, in order to make good outstanding promises and to consolidate power (the most extreme being the land question in Zimbabwe). The relationship between land and conflict has deep colonial roots18 and has now acquired an independent set of mechanisms in present day African countries.

4 Land and Conflict As alienation from the land was a recurrent and almost universal theme in colonial Af-rica, the question of land reform was at the core of nationalist rhetoric, and subse-quently became a pillar of the new constitutions of African countries as they gained in-dependence throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

4.1 Land Reform and Agricultural Development The economic case of land reform, as distinct from the political power of “the land to the tiller” slogan, is based upon the existence of an inverse relationship between the size of the land holding and land productivity, which was at the heart of agricultural economics in developing countries in the 1970s.19 In recent decades, land reform/re-distribution policies in Africa have also been advanced by drawing upon this inverse relationship.

17 Hyden (2008) makes the case that, in Africa, the conflicts are not about land, but about the

control of people. This phenomenon is the consequence of the prevalence of the customary land-tenure systems that make it difficult for the state and the élites to control land directly. Consequently, they see power arising from the number of their retinue (or followers).

18 See Henri Bernstein on the history and politics of land in Africa. For a historical analysis of the role of land in African identities, see Mamdani (1996).

19 The statistical evidence on the inverse relationship was initially explained as the difference be-tween the hardworking small farmer and the unproductive large land-owning class. Subsequent evidence and analysis showed that the phenomenon was likely to be a combination of a greater number of labour hours being put in by the small farmer per unit of land and variations in qual-ity of land. Barrett et al., (2008) provide a review of the debate on inverse size-productivity re-lationship.


16

While land re-distribution in many countries has been regarded as progressive, the results have not always been economically beneficial. In the Central Highlands of Mada-gascar, the effects of land re-distribution reform have been described as, “land distribu-tion which left peasants sufficiently endowed to provide for their own needs could actu-ally reduce agricultural yields” (Barrett, 1993:12). The case of Malawi reveals “an ex-tremely low level of productivity on customary holdings in Malawi…yields of maize barely rose through the 1980s… yields of most smallholder export crops have stagnated or de-clined” (Sahn and Arulpragasam, 1993: 313). A micro-study in the Sudan actually con-firmed a positive relationship between size and productivity (Deininger and Binswanger, 1999) in that “large scale commercial farms achieve the highest yields everywhere in Zimbabwe”, far higher than those achieved by the smallholders in most agro-ecological regions (Deininger and Binswanger, 1992: 25). Evidence from the Western Cape showed that

“In the foreseeable future, the scope for competitive new small-scale farming might be limited…it will not do the cause of rural reform any good to over-emphasise land redistribution at the expense of other programmes which will benefit a far larger number of rural residents.” (Lipton et al., 1996, xx-xxi)

The case for small-scale farming in Africa has also been made based upon African ag-ricultural holding patterns, in which the pre-colonial pattern of agriculture was that of small plots, in which hoe-cultivation, rather than plough-based cultivation systems, was practised. These smallholdings were allocated through the traditional/informal land ar-rangments in place in the community, and, in West Africa, in particular, the ownership was strongly gendered with the phenomenon of men’s and women’s plots (Oppong 1990).

4.2 Smallholder agriculture The mapping of recent policies of land re-distribution onto the phenomenon of small-holder agriculture in Africa has followed a separate set of debates and concerns. The Af-rican literature on small farmers points to the fact that, when labour is abundant and land and capital resources are scarce, small farmers are more efficient in utilising re-sources, and have a higher total productivity. Deininger and Feber (1998) explain that this is due to members of the family having higher incentives than hired labour, and do not accrue hiring or searching costs which sets in place an inverse relationship between farm size and productivity. Binswanger et al., (1995: 2705-2706) point out that:

“The supervision and labour cost advantage of family labour are apparently greater than the disadvantages that the lumpiness of management skills and machines and better access to credit and other risk-diffusion measures confer on large farms.”

IFAD (2001) has also confirmed the advantages of small-scale farming on account of the low level of supervision costs.

The evidence emerging out of African countries is less clear-cut. In Kenya, the rela-tionship varies across regions with the inverse relationship becoming weaker in less fer-tile, unimodal rainfall areas (Hunt 1984), while a positive relationship emerges from the data for larger holdings (Carter and Wiebe, 1990). In the case of Malawi, Dorwood (1999) found a positive relationship between farm-size and productivity. He explained that this was due to the small farmers’ lack of capital to undertake agricultural invest-ment, or purchase inputs.

Market distortions appear to be the major obstacle to small farmers achieving gains, and the political economy of agriculture in Africa seems to be dotted with examples of the generic inefficiencies of the distorted markets (van Zyl et al., 1995). This has led to suggestions that the policies of liberalising agricultural markets in conjunction with land


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reform would support small-scale farming, and would therefore support the smallholder tradition in Africa (World Bank 2008).

Sender and Johnston (2004) provided evidence from Ethiopia and Zimbabwe that re-distributive land reforms, in both countries, had a destructive effect on the rural poor. In Ethiopia, the land reforms resulted in a decline in casual employment and wage-earning opportunities, which contributed to the large number of deaths caused by famine in 1990s, while, in Zimbabwe, “those most disadvantaged by the fast track land reform programme are landless farm workers; large numbers of farm workers have been laid off from paid work; yet, farm workers have not been among the groups targeted to benefit from land re-allocations. Those who are descendants of Zambians, Malawians or Mozambicans…may have additional difficulty in accessing the fast track re-settlement schemes…women, whose rights to land under customary law are weak, have also failed to benefit proportionately from the fast track process” (Human Rights Watch 2002: 3).

4.3 Land ownership and commercial agriculture Western Africa has seen the development of industrial plantations, which have changed the landscape in the Western African Guinea Forest. As smallholders have low productiv-ity in cocoa farming, it is the large plantations that benefit from the expansion of the co-coa output in Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana, and the Ivory Coast. There continues to be an increase in the production of cocoa in all these countries, barring the latter, and any fur-ther expansion of land use is likely to impact adversely on the smallholders.

Sender et al., (2005) do not see land reform as a ready solution to deal with rural poverty and loss of income. The barriers that face rural labour are not all removable through private investment: while transport and infrastructure could be provided by a state with service delivery capacity, the structural disadvantages faced by women would require institutional and legislative initiatives.

The recent World Development Report 2008 makes the case for a “new development of agriculture” aimed at intensifying the role of the market and agribusiness, because “the private sector drives the organisation of value chains that bring the market to smallholders and commercial farms” (World Bank, 2008:8). McMicheal (2009) cautions that these new global value chains in agriculture will not be able to ensure that small-holders are able to enter the world of global agriculture. The agribusiness under the framework of new agriculture could only benefit the traders and retailers but could con-sign smallholders to remaining at the margins of the global value chain, instead of inte-grating in into the new global architecture. At the other end of the chain, importers, roasters and retailers compete for an increasing share of the returns from the global value chain, but only a small part, if any, of this increase is passed on to the local farmer, agricultural intermediaries or governments in the country where such agricul-tural production originates (Fitter and Kaplinsky, 2001; Gibbon and Ponte, 2005). It is mainly those who control critical points along the chain, own established brand-names or have access to shelf space in supermarkets, who make most of the profits in global value chains. (UNCTAD 2008: 51). At the same time, the conditions for smallholders in domestic agriculture have also deteriorated, while the results of domestic land reforms on peasants, smallholders and the rural poor have not resulted in a new class of com-mercial farmers. Instead, the land re-distribution initiatives have resulted in the reten-tion or re-circulation of the land among a small number of existing social élites.

While growing agricultural incomes and diversification can reduce both income ine-quality and poverty (Lanjouw & Lanjouw 2001; Dorward, 2002), the inability to do so could push countries into agrarian crises. The many causes of agrarian crisis-production, trade, and income inequalities, have fanned the winds of recent African conflicts, and both donors and policy-makers risk fuelling the causes of war anew if they continue to ignore these inequities (Richards and Bah 2005).


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4.4 Land Rights and Distributional Conflict One major source of agrarian inequality is associated with the distribution of land rights in conflict and post-conflict contexts. Land distribution, both in relation to the inequality of distribution and the low level of certainty of use and tenure, is rapidly emerging as a key source of conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa (Huggins and Clover 2004; Alinovi et al., 2007). These conflicts appear to be deeply rooted in the system of access to land that existed under colonial administration, but find new points of conflagration in relation to more recent land distribution policies associated with ethnic identity. In particular, as countries move towards a commodified market economy, they experience, on the one hand, the increased formalisation of the legal system, and, on the other, an increased alienation from customary tenures (Vlassenroot and Huggins 2005; Pantuliano 2008, Alinovi et al., 2008). This leads to contradictory tendencies: as the rights to land are in-creasingly becoming a source of economic production and wealth accumulation in Sub-Saharan Africa, while, at the same time, remaining a complex and organic basis for so-cial relationships and cultural values, as well as a source of prestige and power (Huggins and Clover 2005). Clover (2005) recognises that land tenure and its implications are, therefore, simultaneously, both a development and a rights-based matter.

The continued co-existence of formal and customary legal systems has given rise to the phenomenon of legal dualism. The consensus that the rule of law is a pre-requisite for development has often been taken to mean the shift away from the customary, often termed as the “traditional” and “informal”, systems of law (Benda Beckmann 2006). While the formal legal system focuses on economic exchange, production and trade, and is an arm of the state, these customary systems operate outside the state arena, provid-ing social control, dispute resolution, and reconciliation, especially with regard to familial matters and land tenure issues (Pouligny 2009). The notion that state and society oper-ate as separate and insulated spheres is fallacious, and the two-way process of interac-tion between state and society in Africa has been termed as a state-in-society ap-proach.20 The nature of state-society interaction is specific to the history, national and local structures of a society.21 In the context of a conflict or a post-conflict situation, such as the aftermath of a war, facing the multiple disorientations of internally-displaced persons, returning migrants, and fear of the state, marginalised rural people turn from the formal legal system to the customary system of dispute resolution and reconciliation (Pouligny 2009, Le Sage 2005).

Conflict situations often arise where state actors advocate a re-distribution of national resources to facilitate a new, or reforming, economic context, thereby leading to acute contestation among domestic groups (Fennell 2009).22 Conflict can also have a devas-tating impact on existing patterns of land access due to shifts in authority structures, resulting in forced displacement of oppositional groups, followed by the consolidation of new power structures (Vlassenroot and Huggins 2005; Huggins and Clover 2004). The role of land, as an exceedingly valuable and status-enhancing resource, and its particu-lar attractiveness for dominant and emergent élites has been acknowledged as a distinct catalyst of conflict in Sub-Saharan countries in recent times (Dexter and Ntahombaye 2005; Pantuliano 2007) that spirals from élite competition for scarce natural resources –

20 See Migdal, 2001. The study of state-society interactions within economic development as a

separate area of study has evolved from a long-standing interest within political science. A powerful analysis of the critical role of the state in patterns of development is put forth by Mig-dal, Kohli and Shue (1994).

21 See Brautigam, 2004. 22 This corresponds to Case 6 in Diagram 2, in which the demands for the agricultural sector are

met with reshaping development programmes


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particularly land – and élite struggles for political power, to ensure the access and con-trol of such resources.23

The negative blow endured by social structures due to the demands and desires of domestic élites, both within the state and outside of it, has generated some recent stud-ies on the consequences of land-related policy shifts in Sub-Saharan African countries. Udry and Goldstein (2005) examined the links between the perceptions of individuals regarding their own land rights, and the social and political position of the households to which they belonged, in the case of Ghana. They found that those with political influence had a greater sense of ownership. Dercon and Ayalew (2007) found a strong causal link between how land rights are perceived by farmers, and the extent to which land is allo-cated to perennial crops in Ethiopia: in particular, in the case where the state offers full transfer rights to all (be they inherited, purchased or allocated by the government), their model predicts that there will be an increase in the total land area allocated to coffee by about 22 per cent.24

As these interesting results regarding the impact of politics and the perceptions of land rights emerge, there is still considerable debate about the way forward in relation to land reform, particularly land-titling in Africa, as well as the extent to which such practices can be replicated from urban to rural environments (Cotula et al., 2006, Toul-min et al., 2004). While these academic debates continue to gather steam, the adminis-trative evidence indicates that legal reform is underway: with land law reform at an ad-vanced stage in 17 countries in the continent (Angola, Burkina Faso, the Ivory Coast, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mauritania, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Tanzania, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, the Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Zanzibar), while new national land poli-cies have been drafted or are under discussion in another eleven countries (Benin, Bot-swana, the Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Swaziland, Togo, Zambia and Zim-babwe) (Huggins and Clover 2005: 27).25 The central contradiction of land reform ap-pears to be one in which the history of land reform constitutes the core of the develop-ment experience of Sub-Saharan African countries, although the experience of land re-form has not given rise either to economic development or to political stability in recent decades.

The inability of state initiatives of land re-distribution to provide security of tenure or ownership rights points to both incipient authority and legitimacy failures (see Diagram 2). This can occur in cases in which the state has the capacity to develop and new legis-lation has not been appropriately implemented (as in the case of Kenya) or in cases in which administrative reforms are undertaken because the state has the capacity to re-spond and these re-order rights through creating new opportunities for the élites to gain access to valuable resources.

In the main, as agricultural paradigms and government policies in agriculture have both been unable to lift African economies out of their poverty, there is an increasing problem of the impoverishment of peasants and smallholders, often leading to destitu- 23 The demands can place the state in a position where its legitimacy becomes fragile and reduces

their capacity to develop and/or respond as depicted by Case 3 and Case 6 respectively as set out in Diagram 2.

24 The initial studies on land reform were conducted on data sets in Asia in which there has been greater concern with the distributional conflicts emerging from unequal distribution of land. The impact of tenancy reforms in India, provided the context for a paper that studied the implica-tion for agricultural productivity in West Bengal (Banerjee et al., 2002); a study using a similar methodology was undertaken by Do and Iyer (2005) and focuses on the impact of land reform in Vietnam and its impact on agricultural investments, including that of perennial crops.

25 Legal reform of the agricultural sector is particularly prone to failure where the state suffers from authority failure, as the state is unable to prevent violence and theft of new rights and in-comes provided by the new legal ownership. This makes citizens wary to taking up the oppor-tunities provided by legal reform due to fear of threats and actual harm for disgruntled neighbours and agricultural groups.


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tion and the abandonment of the rural sector for the city (Opal and Fay 2000) as the system continues to unravel and pushes the rural poor out (Bryceson and Potts 2006). These individuals are also no longer supported by the informal network of the commu-nity, and, indeed, the ability of the community to continue to operate using moral recip-rocity is now negligible in many areas of rural Africa. Both these challenges to agricul-tural development have resulted in the crisis in rural livelihood becoming a major con-cern in the battle to reduce poverty and hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa.

5 Crises and Vulnerability in Agriculture The unravelling of rural lives, indicated by a rise in rural poverty, became evident in Sub-Saharan Africa during the 1980s, in the aftermath of structural adjustment pro-grammes and macro-economic adjustment, and provided the impetus to find ways of supporting those who seemed unable to protect themselves from external shocks im-pacting upon them (Subbarao et al., 1997). The worsening situation of rural households to sustain themselves through agricultural production, distribution and trade within the context of national and international agricultural programmes has given rise to a re-newed focus on the relationship between food insecurity and rural livelihoods.

5.1 Food Insecurity and Livelihoods The analysis of household behaviour in Africa has revealed that rural households choose low-risk, but also low-return crops to be able to withstand external shocks, even though this strategy lowers both the yield and the income that they obtain from agriculture, as they have inadequate access to economic instruments (insurance) and financial markets (credit) to reduce their risk. While shocks have the ability to impact upon all households, those in poverty appear to be the most affected as their poverty makes them the least able to draw upon resources, and/or assets (financial, physical and social) in order to respond to the impact. Tracing the household response to external shocks, risks and natural hazards identified the central role played by the coping strategies, which are the mechanisms adopted to deal with the impact.26

These coping mechanisms are ex post short-term responses to income shocks, and are used by the poor, who are already living on inadequate incomes and have little or no assets to provide buffers to these events. These strategies “are responses to poverty and food insecurity that actually exacerbate poverty and food insecurity” (Mitchell et al., 2008:15), and households that are forced to sell their assets for food can only help to mitigate short-term shocks and seriously compromise their future livelihoods with eco-nomic, physical, social, and environmental costs, which diminish their overall ability to cope with future shocks and risks.

Alderman and Paxson (1994) distinguished between risk-coping strategies and risk-management strategies among rural households, and showed that risk-management strategies were a method of risk reduction, while risk-coping strategies were merely ex-ercises in risk mitigation. The analysis of household behaviour revealed that rural households do put in place methods to mitigate production risk by using methods of ex-ante risk minimisation (Mordoch and Sharma 2001). Dercon (1996) pointed out that, in Ethiopia, this short-term risk minimisation strategy had resulted in households becoming stuck in rural poverty traps. Other risk-reduction strategies have been unearthed by

26 There appears to be a sequence of coping strategies: early responses were often a shift to low-

cost food options and reduction, or complete cessation of all non-essential spending. This was followed by sale of valuable, but discrete, assets, such as livestock in exchange of food, infor-mal loans or grants from friends, and borrowing from the informal market by using the services of a moneylender at high interest rates. The final stage was the sale of key productive assets, such as land, and migration out of the area in response to the adverse impact when all other available options had been exhausted (Morduch and Sharma 2001; IDS, 2008).


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work using a livelihoods approach in Africa, which shows that, when rural households spread, rather than reduce, risk through diversifying livelihoods away from farming, they are able to improve their incomes, but continue to suffer from the variability of these new sources of income (Reardon, 1997; Ellis, 2000).27

The success stories in maintaining livelihoods in African agriculture are also few and far between, for current mechanisms provided to support rural livelihoods, both by gov-ernments and donors, are unable to move household from on risk-coping to risk-reducing strategies. Exceptions occur when carefully targeted and finely differentiated programmes in Africa have been able to reduce poverty: in the case of Ethiopia, the Employment Generation Scheme channelled 80 per cent of the food aid through food-for-work programmes and only 20 per cent was disbursed as “relief”, for the households which were regarded as being capable of work, rather than passive recipients (Devereux 2002).

The strategies of households in relation to external shocks are also dependent on whether they are net sellers or purchasers of food. The position of the household with regard to being a net seller or buyer of food also has a considerable effect on the type and magnitude of the impact that price shocks have on their food insecurity and pov-erty. Consequently, rural households could gain from food price increases if they have a net food surplus to sell on the local market, while urban poor households are almost universally negatively impacted by adverse price shocks. The State of World Food Inse-curity (SOFI 2008) shows that 93 per cent of all households, with 93 per cent rural and 86 per cent urban, were net buyers of food staples in Malawi.

As short-term impacts are critical in situations of food insecurity these windfall gains could help rural net food selling households through the initial impact of an adverse shock. Recent research on the impact of food prices on households shows that, while food price increases do increase poverty, the magnitude of the shock is of critical impor-tance. In the case of West and Central African countries, rural households appear to benefit from short-term gains from food price spikes, but with an increase in the magni-tude also being significant: with an increase of fifty per cent in food prices, the benefit of increased prices for rural net sellers would be overcome by the large scale importation of food and would result in a 2.4 to 4.4 per cent increase in the percentage of people in poverty (Wodon et al., 2008, Wodon and Zaman 2008).

A report of food security, just issued by USAID points out that Sub-Saharan Africa can expect to see a 5.5 per cent increase in food insecure people in 2009 if there is no increase in external assistance. Without any increase in external assistance, SSA food security is expected to deteriorate in 2009 (USAID 2009). An even worse prognosis is made by the IMF report, Impact of the Global Financial Crisis on Sub-Saharan Africa, published in January 2009, which calculated a 9 per-cent increase in food-insecurity from the food-security baseline against a scenario of lower export growth and reductions in net inflows of capital in 2009 in relation to 2008. These calculations do not provide much hope that even rural net sellers of food are going to be able to move out of food insecurity despite short-term price gains in the current food market environment in Afri-can countries.

The type of aid that can best support rural livelihoods in the face of external shocks has also emerged as a matter of importance in reducing household vulnerability. While cash transfers are becoming common practice, there are concerns that incorporating these into the larger budget cycle of the government could be a challenge. This is be-cause the shocks and hazards that affect poor households and individuals could also af-fect the fiscal resources available to the state and then these transfers might simply re-place other funds, rather than be a net addition. 27 The livelihoods approach draws on work in development studies, ecology and anthropology to

understand the income and social strategies of individuals and households for survival and their potential for asset accumulation (Bebbington 1999).


22

Other new research on poor agricultural households in Africa, identify the existence of three types of thresholds, asset, market, and price, which can keep households in a poverty trap situation (Carter and Barrett 2007). There are still gaps in our understand-ing of the possible trade-offs between these thresholds, in order to ensure that poor households are able to move from short-term coping strategies to sustainable rural live-lihoods.

The difficulties in moving households from risk-coping to risk-reducing strategies through agricultural programmes can be regarded as a consequence of a low capacity to develop in the state. Such limited capacity in the face of authority failure, where the state cannot prevent the possibility of assault on its potential beneficiaries will result in generalised subsidies that do not meet the target population. This appears to be a major problem for many rural livelihood programmes in Sub-Saharan Africa, and, conse-quently, rural groups are forced to draw on their own group resources to support them-selves.

5.2 Safety Nets Safety nets did exist in rural communities in Sub-Saharan Africa, and were based upon informal sources of protection such as remittances, inter-household transfers and loans, and indigenous insurance mechanisms. Udry (1994) identified informal loans in Nigeria as being state-contingent, i.e., dependent on the situation of both the borrower and the lender, in situations in which a negative shock would result in more favourable terms for the concerned party. The famines of the 1980s in the Horn of Africa have been linked to the inability of informal coping strategies to prevent households and individuals from slipping into poverty. Transfers in the aftermath of the famine of 1984 in the Sahel amounted to only 3 per cent of the losses faced by the poorest households (Reardon 1998), and Dercon (2002) showed that, ten years after the famine, cattle stocks were only two-thirds of what they had been prior to the famine.

The response of national governments and international agencies to the growing evi-dence on rural poverty and the unravelling of rural livelihoods were to devise and im-plement safety-net programmes with the objective of directly reducing poverty. As the nature and causes of poverty are varied, these programmes recognised the need to dis-tinguish between persistent (chronic) poverty and temporary (transient) poverty. Chronic poverty is the situation in which households remain in poverty over time due to their low and inadequate asset base, whereas transient poverty arises when households fall into poverty due to their inability to protect themselves adequately from both antici-pated and unanticipated shocks.28 These public programmes were mainly built around public works29 that focused on employment guarantee schemes or food-for-work pro-grammes.30 The safety-net policies implemented in Sub-Saharan Africa have not been universally successful. They did not often succeed in identifying or reaching the target groups. Instead, the programme became a provider of a generalised subsidy to all cate-gories of the poor in the locality. Programmes were often tardy in the setting-up stage, and inefficient in the transference of funds. In addition, these programmes tended to be 28 Drèze and Sen (1991) advocated that a promotional approach to chronic poverty by enhancing

the asset base of households and a protective approach to transient poverty in order to prevent households from entering the poverty spiral.

29 Dreze and Sen (1991) highlighted the importance of public action to remedy the exclusion and poverty that accompany the development process.

30 The first employment guarantee schemes were implemented in relation to poverty alleviation programmes in India in the mid-1970s. The concept of employment guarantee was provided by Keynes in his early welfare programmes and the state is still regarded as an “employer of the last resort” within the field of Keynesian economics. While national governments were the sole providers of employment programmes in the early decades, the World Food Programme has been an important international player in the implementation of food for work programmes in Africa.


23

unco-ordinated and duplicative, so that the transfer costs remained high with no, or lim-ited, gains from the scaling up of the operations. Second, they are made up of a myriad of small, unco-ordinated, and duplicative transfer programmes. Finally, where transfers were successful, they were often too small to get individuals and households out of pov-erty (Devereux and Sabates Wheeler 2004).31 The biggest failure has been in the inabil-ity of these programmes to move households out of high levels of vulnerability where they are doomed to rely only upon risk-coping strategies, and/or out of poverty so that they can begin to construct and implement risk-management strategies.

There is evidence that safety nets do not need to remain as income transfers, which can, at best, be palliative in effect, but can, in fact, provide income-generating potential, and thereby effectively insulate them from risk and vulnerability if they are carefully linked to the nature and type of poverty at the local level. Devereux (2002) found that carefully-targeted and finely-differentiated safety-nets in Africa have been able to re-duce poverty. In the case of Zambia, the public authorities went against the accepted view that the provision of rural public works projects would crowd out agricultural work, and found that the participants in the cash-for-work scheme ploughed their income back into hiring labour to work on their plots.

In the main, social safety-nets continued to be a form of social assistance provided by international agencies to countries that were too poor or administratively feeble to pro-vide fully-fledged social welfare schemes. With the new conceptual thinking on the im-portance of livelihoods, the new understanding of the relationship between risk and vul-nerability, and the recognition that poverty was a multi-dimensional phenomenon at the end of the 1980s and at the start of the 1990s, the safety-net framework came to be regarded as paternalistic and the term “social protection” gained currency as a more nu-anced and better-focused policy agenda for dealing with improving income prospects and reducing chronic poverty (Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler 2004).

5.3 Social Protection

“Social protection describes all interventions from public, private and voluntary or-ganisations and social networks, to support communities, households and individu-als in their efforts to prevent, manage and overcome vulnerability.” Chronic Pov-erty Report 2008-2009 (CPRC, 2008: 42)

The complex interactions between risk and vulnerability among poor households pro-vided the motivation to look for a system of social protection that would focus on long-term and sustainable poverty reduction. This would require risk-management to be linked directly to economic growth, so that reducing risk by protecting the poor against income and consumption variability would provide the conditions by which they could move out of poverty thorough investing and accumulating (Fennell 2009). There is also a need to understand that the “social” in social protection needs to be addressed di-rectly. As poverty is both an economic and a social phenomenon, based upon exclusion and destitution, empowerment must go hand in hand with income generation so that social and economic transformation can occur (Wheeler and Devereux 2008).

Social protection programmes have two major objectives: (i) to provide opportunities for the poor to increase their income in the short- to medium-term; and (ii) to address risk and vulnerability by permitting individuals and households to make investments that will end the inter-generational transmission of poverty (Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler 2004). These objectives have proved to be challenging in relation to the form of protec-tion as well as in relation to the larger financial and social context. 31 The limited and piecemeal nature of the safety-net programmes could be put down to a state

that has a low capacity to develop, a high capacity to respond, and in the delivery of these programmes being unable to provide effective subsidies. It could also have a very poor fiscal ability due to service delivery failure.


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In Malawi, the Agricultural Inputs Subsidy Programme used Starter Packs to provide farmers with transfers for the production of maize. While the programme did result in income gains, there was a differential result with poor smallholders benefiting more from a universal input transfer than from a targeted input transfer (Dorward, 2006). The evaluations of the Starter Packs scheme concluded that it increased maize yields and harvests (Levy, 2005), but the real income gain did not seem sufficient to improve household investment and accumulation. Slater et al., (2006) point out that the Ethiopia Productive Safety Nets Programme was also successful in linking social and economic development objectives because it took specific account of the social context of the la-bour markets and the income generation strategies of the households.

The need to link these cash transfers to the larger budget cycle of the government has also been a challenge. As the shocks and hazards that affect poor households and individuals could also affect the fiscal resources available to the state, these transfers might simply replace other funds, rather than be a net addition. The opposing tenden-cies of increasing social outlays and of the fiscal contraction faced by government can result in social protection programmes being pro-cyclical rather than counter-cyclical (Alderman and Haque 2006). There are also political economy concerns that these cash transfers could be working to aid and abet the existing opportunities for corruption and dependence within existing agricultural institutions (Schubert and Slater 2006) and could be inimical to sustainable development as these transfers would be driven by po-litical desires rather than development considerations (Chinsinga 2007).32

The social protection agenda requires further fine-tuning given that poor households encounter three types of thresholds, assets, the market, and prices, which keep them in a poverty-trap situation. Dorward and Kydd (2005) identify that there are trade-offs be-tween asset and market thresholds in using targeted or universal input transfers that could be used to support longer-term pro-poor growth in Malawi. Where there is a deci-sion that needs to be made about whether fiscal transfers should be universal or tar-geted and the state only has the capacity to respond, these transfers may suffer on ac-count of service delivery failure (See Case 5 in Diagram 2).

Agricultural safety nets usually have direct and strong impacts but are often plagued by sustainability problems related to their cost and/or the negative effect on the private sector. However, Sabates-Wheeler et al., (2008) assert that synergies between agricul-tural and social protection policies can arise if, for example, effective investments in ag-ricultural development reduce budgetary requirements for social protection programmes and/or, by promoting growth, increase the resources available over time for financing social protection. Hoddinott (2005) and Devereux (2008) found that the impact of pro-ductive safety net interventions could be effective, in particular, when it was linked to easing access to improved seeds and fertilisers. But the design of such programmes de-termines the level of success. For example, in Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Nets Pro-gramme (PSNP) (the second largest social protection programme in Sub-Saharan Africa after South Africa), there was little benefit for households where the transfer levels fell far below the programme targets (Gilligan et al., 2008), but where households had ac-cess to both PSNP transfers and agricultural support packages, they were more likely to be food secure, borrow for productive purposes, use improved agricultural technologies, and operate their own non-farm business activities.

Micro-finance and micro-insurance programmes also act as a form of social protection for the poor and the vulnerable (Morduch, 1999) and can smooth consumption during an adverse shock, avoid distress sales of assets, and replace productive assets (Alderman and Haque 2006). These loans work at three levels: to provide funds to smooth con-sumption spending (Pitt and Khandker 2002); to improve income earning opportunities;

32 This is a particularly widespread problem in which the state has only the capacity to respond

and responds to demands from the agricultural sector through siphoning off funds rather than taking on a systemic reform of redistribution channels ( See Case 3 and Case 6 in Diagram 2).


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and to faciliate investment and accumulation, and thereby allow people to make their way out of the poverty trap. This would allow households to move away from risk-coping, to risk-management strategies, and to move towards ex-ante income diversifica-tion.

Evidence from Ghana reveals that there is increasing tendency for the public sector to provide formal micro-insurance, although these initiatives are largely an extension of the existing social security systems and do not include the poor, who are mostly unem-ployed (Adeji, Arun and Hossain 2009). The National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) of Ghana only targeted a limited percentage of the population and is biased against the poor, and the state is unlikely to extend the social security system to the entire popula-tion, at least in the medium-term (Arun and Steiner 2008).

In Zambia, social protection programmes have been fragmented, piecemeal and reac-tive, and largely dependent on donors, with the exception of the employment-based pension funds and the Public Welfare Assistance Scheme (PWAS). The two government initiatives have limited coverage: employment-based pension funds are unlikely to reach the poorest people as they only provide protection for the formal labour force (which is about 10 per cent of the total labour force) while the PWAS, which is to assist the desti-tute with in-kind support, has selected only a limited number of households.

There is also a threshold evident here with formal protection being regarded as more important by richer households, while informal sources of protection and recourse to the labour market are more prominent among the poorest sections (Barrientos et al., 2005). It would appear that it is still the case that these social policies are unable to address those most at risk and most vulnerable, for “while most micro-finance institutions serve poor clients, few work with the ‘poorest’ – the elderly, the socially isolated, and the physically disabled” Morduch and Sharma (2001:26). The presence of thresholds, scale effects and other asymmetries among the poorest and less poor households indicates that there remain ambiguities in the extent to which social interventions can create pathways out of rural poverty (Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler 2004).

In addition, there is a strong gendered-effect of such policies and in Sub-Saharan Af-rica: where women are primarily responsible for food crop production and household nu-trition, social protection targeted at women is likely to have an impact on the health and nutrition of children. Targeted social protection programmes can have significant impacts on the productivity of the current and future labour force, especially if they include pre-ventative health and nutrition programmes such as vitamin supplementation targeted at vulnerable groups. In some cases, food, rather than cash, transfers to women may tar-get households more effectively as they are not affected by price inflation and are less likely to attract men, who spend less of their income on food for the household (Quin-sumbing et al., 2008).

Finally, the ability of poor rural households to display diversification requires that these households are successfully able to move away from short-term ex-post coping mechanisms to developing long-term livelihood strategies, i.e., showing a greater resil-ience to shocks through appropriate adaptation strategies. The importance of resilience as a long-term policy could be a way forward to reduce household level food insecurity, that would work towards a market-oriented set of policies which could, in turn, help to increase the access that poor household have to investment and infrastructure markets (Sarris and Rasponmanikis 2009; Binswanger 2008).


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6 Food Security, Resilience and Sustainability Poor rural households suffer from both production-risk and consumption–risk, and the exposure to risk and their high vulnerability makes them particularly prone to food inse-curity and hunger.

6.1 Hunger and Food Insecurity The Millennium Development Goal of halving the 1990 levels of extreme hunger by 2015 expresses the global concern felt about the continuing high levels of hunger. The prob-lem of hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa remains of particular concern for two reasons: the first being the high levels of hunger, and the second being the persistence of hunger. Sub-Saharan Africa, along with South Asia, is the region with the most severe hunger problems. Seventy-five per cent of the poorest of the poor, those living on less than 50 cents a day, live in Africa (162 million people) (Ahmed et al., 2007). Moreover, unlike South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa has seen only marginal improvements in its score from 1990 to 2006.33 Even beyond this, Andrews and Flores (2008) point to an increasing number of food crises in the Sub-Saharan region, with the number of annual food emer-gencies tripling between the 1980s and 2000.

In evaluating food insecurity, the literature emphasises two key aspects: availability, and access or entitlements. Within the context of Sub-Saharan Africa, these two aspects remain linked by the importance of rural livelihoods to both. As the World Development Report puts it:

“Agricultural production is important for food security because it is a source of in-come for the majority of the rural poor. It is particularly critical in a dozen coun-tries of Sub-Saharan Africa, with a combined population of about 200 million and with highly variable domestic production, limited tradability of food staples, and foreign exchange constraints in meeting their food needs through imports. These countries are exposed to recurrent food emergencies and the uncertainties of food aid, and for them, increasing and stabilizing domestic production is essential for food security.” (2008:3)

The current resurgence in concern about food security and hunger has been within the context of higher food prices, and, while it resembles the context of the original con-cern about food security arising in 1974 (Maxwell 1996), there have been advances in the approaches, for example, from food availability to broader concerns with livelihoods. This latest impetus has led to the evolution of new techniques for tracking hunger and food security.

One of these techniques is the Global Hunger Index (GHI), which is an attempt to create a multi-dimensional metric for hunger, which reflects a broader understanding of the nuances of hunger. It equally weights measures of the prevalence of under-nourished people in the population, the prevalence of underweight children under five, and the mortality of children under five. The benefit of creating a unified measure is that it allows for the easy classification of countries into different categories. The Report breaks countries down into “extremely alarming”, “alarming”, “serious”, “moderate”, and “low hunger”. Bringing the prevalence of under-nourished people and underweight chil-dren into a unified measure represents an advancement, because it shows the temporal aspect of hunger, representing the chronic nature of the problem and the long-term ef-fects that it can have, given that malnourishment at a young age has long-term effects. The final measure of child mortality seems less intuitive, could be problematical because it reflects so much more than the simple relationship between food and health, and, when weighting it equally with underweight children, seems to give children too much weight in the measure as a whole. 33 Global Hunger Report 2008.


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Another recent quantitative advancement has been the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). While methods for assessing and monitoring food security status already existed, such as those used by the Famine Early Warning System (FEWS), the IPC represents an attempt to advance on old methods. The IPC uses a wide variety of measures in its classification system, and includes recommended strategic responses. Andrews and Flores (2008) argue that the IPC is beneficial as it provides a common method of classification that can be used cross-country as well as providing consistency in bridging situations and response analysis. Their analysis of the application of the ap-proach in Ethiopia and Kenya does seem to suggest that it can bring a more nuanced understanding of risk and vulnerability, which can be applied to building long-term strategies, rather than as a means for diagnosing short-term problems. Considering the ongoing problems with bias towards dealing with food emergencies as they arise, rather than addressing the underlying risks, the IPC does represent an advancement.

6.2 Humanitarian Aid Table 1 sets out the list of African countries that require external assistance and the ex-tent to which this is likely to change. Table 2 lists the promise and delivery of food aid in African countries: in the case of Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and Zimbabwe, they produced less food in 2004-05 than they did a decade ago, al-though the delivery of aid still remains at between a third to a half of the level of the promised food aid. This lack of response from the international agencies is a matter for concern, and if the tardiness is on account of a lack of knowledge of the local context (Pouligny 2009, Pantuliano et al. 2009), then gaining access to these local information networks and engaging with the stakeholders becomes a particular matter of urgency. The lack of willingness on the part of international agencies to engage with social justice exacerbates the weaknesses among international professionals and technical experts on African agriculture on account of the two decades of long neglect of the agriculture sec-tor (the World Bank IEG 2008). In particular, the World Bank’s strategy for agriculture has been increasingly subsumed within a broader rural focus, which has diminished its importance. Both arising from and contributing to this, the technical skills needed to support agricultural development adequately have also declined over time.

International agencies have put in place strategy-frameworks for fragile states, which can inform them of the appropriate policy options for protracted food security crises. There are, however, gaps in their knowledge of how such protracted crises should relate to the various types of aid, humanitarian, food and the broader category of development aid, and the process of handover or sequencing from one type to another (Alinovi 2007, Action Aid 2008). There are still extant challenges on how to link relief and develop-ment, particularly in relation to policy- and funding-gaps between humanitarian assis-tance, rehabilitation and development (Alinovi et al., 2007). The importance of ensuring that international interventions do not exacerbate or rekindle conflict through working with local institutions, both non-state and state actors, based upon stakeholder affirma-tion of their expertise, knowledge and legitimacy is increasingly emphasised in academic and policy analysis (Pantuliano 2008; 2009; Pouligny 2009).

6.3 Food Aid Food insecurity and fragility tend to interact in a vicious circle in the context of dysfunc-tional institutions, particularly those of, or associated with, the nation state. The inability of the state to prevent conflict, and the associated failure to ensure any development goals, have given rise to international criteria for identifying fragile states being set out by international financial institutions and donor agencies in order to assess the chal-lenges that they face in working with such countries (OECD 2007).

In this context, the ability of the state to create new agricultural policies and pro-grammes could be regarded as a sign of growing institutional capacity. The importance of the domestic actors, particularly, key figures in the Ministry of Agriculture in directing


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policies and owning processes, is critical to ensure service delivery (Cabral and Scoones 2006). In particular, the role played by domestic and international institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa can be analysed in order to understand the extent to which state fragility could be an explanation of poor agricultural performance (Singh et al., 2009).

The ability to identify the type of state fragility experienced by a country could be gained from looking at the gaps in the literature on food insecurity and vulnerability. In particular, there is considerable evidence that, in Sub-Saharan Africa, the increase in starvation and malnutrition is largely the outcome of the conditions in five war-torn countries.34 Secondly, these countries are regarded by international organisations, agen-cies and INGOs, as being more susceptible to social and economic conflicts which bring about food shortages and crises.

Drawing from the specialist literatures on poverty reduction, disaster management and food aid has helped to advance our understanding of food crises and their relation-ship to risk and vulnerability. In particular, there has been a shift in time-frames, from the disaster-management literature that looks at natural hazards and has, therefore, fo-cused on short-term responses (Alwang et al., 2001), to the social risk-management lit-erature and poverty literature (Dercon, 2001; Holzmann and Jørgensen, 2000; World Bank, 2000), which are concerned with guaranteeing a minimum welfare threshold of food security and, therefore, working with longer-term measures (Lovendahl and Knowles 2005).

Secondly, the use of the concepts of risk and vulnerability in the literature has be-come a rallying point for gaining a better understanding of the nature of crises and the impact of the most susceptible sections of the population.35 The current definition of vul-nerability in a food context refers to an unfavourable future outcome that is the result of the exposure to the full range of risks, including those factors that affect their capability to cope.36 The social risk-management framework moves away from regarding risk as an exogenously given factor and towards viewing vulnerability as a feature that is lo-cated within a socio-political context with the associated policy approach that focuses on changing this context so as to minimise the risk faced by vulnerable groups (Wheeler and Haddad 2005: 16).

There is also advice from the cognate discipline of ecology which stresses the benefit of cross-disciplinary pollination. Ostrom (2006) points out that ecologists have benefited from drawing upon the concept of vulnerability from the study of poverty and natural hazards by taking forward their understanding of the impact of environmental change. In a reverse manner, increasing attraction has been given to drawing upon ecological and engineering notions of resilience, in order to understand the ability of individuals and households to deal with shocks. (Alinovi et al., 2009). (Holling 1973, p. 17). Folkes’ (2006) definition of resilience as “the ability to persist through continuous development in the face of change, and innovate and transform to more favourable configurations” (Folke 2006: 254) could provide a way of identifying how food insecurity can be moder-ated and vulnerability reduced through local practices.37 In a food context, this would 34 The war raging in these five countries made it impossible to achieve the poverty reduction

goals set out by the World Food Summit in 1996 (SOFI, 2006). 35 Vulnerability was originally part of the poverty literature and was used to identify the response

of households or small communities to risks and shocks, or to show how vulnerable groups are unable to participate in income generating opportunities (Holzmann and Jørgensen, 2000).

36 While coping mechanisms have tended to be studied as an explanation for the stable responses to food scarcity through which households insulate themselves from hunger, the greater likeli-hood of food crises can result in the breakdown of such mechanisms and greater susceptibility to food insecurity leading to survival mechanisms that can lead to permanent damage of household/individual well-being (Darcy and Hofmann, 2003: 35).

37 Resilience is at the centre of the work being undertake at the STEPS (Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability) research programme, uniting development studies with science and technology studies and is based at the Institute of Development Studies and


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relate to the ability of food systems to absorb external shocks by internal re-working, thereby preventing food crises. It also has significant resonances with the definition of resilience as “the ability of state and society to cope with changes in the state’s capacity, effectiveness, or legitimacy, i.e., the capacity to renegotiate the terms of the social con-tract over and over again in the international agency context” (EC Mapping of Donors document 2008:22). The ability of the concept of resilience to go from food security to state-building is an illustration of the possibility of moving from risk-coping to risk-management. What is still required is an understanding of how the political and institu-tional context can be mapped onto the food aid, humanitarian aid and the long-term prospects for food security.

The risks associated with food insecurity require an evaluation of the political and in-stitutional context (Andrews and Flores 2008). While political opposition and conflict im-pact directly on the fragility of states, they also make people more vulnerable in emer-gency situations, such as humanitarian crises and famine (Pantuliano 2007). Although the possibility of identity (for example, ethnicity and religion) and assets (for example, money and possessions), as a source of liability that could result in greater vulnerability, is greater in the context of state fragility (Zhang et al., 2007), these aspects have rarely been analysed, nor do they find their way into the building of humanitarian assistance programmes for risk reduction strategies (Maxwell et al., 2007). While the recent reduc-tion in conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa could be regarded as a positive feature, it should not be taken as a sign that the institutional impact on food insecurity will decline. The evidence continues to point out that conflict-ridden countries generally perform worse on the various measures of vulnerability compared to non-conflict countries. Thus, it is im-portant for academic and agency work to continue to consider the role of conflict when addressing vulnerability in SSA (Alinovi 2007, Zhang et al., 2007, Andrews and Flores 2008).

There appears to be an emerging consensus that food crises should no longer be re-garded as unique events; instead, they should be analysed in relation to the likelihood of repeated bouts of scarcity and hunger, which are largely the consequences of social and political institutional environments (Alinovi 2008, Andrews and Flores 2008, Pantuliano 2007, Longley 2007). According to Alinovi et al., (2007), the institutional dysfunctional-ity began well-before the conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa, and these - directly or indi-rectly - contributed to the persistence of food insecurity in these countries. Notwith-standing this, international responses to crises still focus solely on life-saving and short-term protection measures. It has become common practice for international assistance to provide only humanitarian assistance, largely in response to the difficulties of working in local conditions in the conflict zone. Such humanitarian responses tend to ignore or exclude community-based societies, local institutions and governments, as they may be perceived as part of the conflict, while ethnographic case studies reveal that it is pre-cisely these informal institutions, such as social norms, and kinship-based networks that sometimes provide incentives to develop survival strategies for protracted crises (Alinovi et al., 2007; Pantuliano 2008). It is evident from the academic literature on state-building that there is also reluctance to engage in trans-disciplinary work that draws from different fields of expertise, preferring to look at issues from within one sector and using a technical perspective (Pouligny 2009). It is not just the subject of study that is subject to a crisis, there is also a “crisis mode” apparent among policy-analysts and field-practitioners (Chambers 2008; Pouligny 2009). In addition, policy-makers working in the area of state-building suffer from being relatively unfamiliar with conflict contexts, because past programmes on state-building have tended to be associated with the wel-

SPRU Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Sussex and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, UK (www.steps-centre.org).


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fare state in Europe and the development state in Asia.38 Taking up the challenge of working with existing legal institutions in order to understand, map and, in many cases, put together a refurbished set of laws around land ownership and access poses as many capacity issues for international experts as it does for national governments (See Dia-gram 2 for the legitimacy failure attached to such a procedure).

In this regard, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) DAC guidelines on Helping Prevent Violent Conflict examine land-related sources of con-flict in both a thorough and a thoughtful manner. The loss of land as a cause of popula-tion displacement, the role of localised and regional scarcity of productive land, and changes in land-tenure systems are identified as contributing factors to violent conflict over resources. The importance of land-tenure to ensure post-conflict re-construction through a resolution of land-holding related disputes that will prevent further outbreaks of local and national tension is also emphasised: in particular, it is necessary to ensure access to land for demobilised soldiers in order to facilitate the re-integration of combat-ant groups into society.39

International agencies have made progress by providing measures for food insecurity that relate food availability to vulnerability. Vulnerability Information and Mapping Sys-tems (FIVIMS) by the FAO is an international instrument based upon local livelihood data and finds ways to integrate it with national food security data.40 The importance of livelihoods, and the danger of livelihood insecurity in exposing poor and hungry house-holds to repeated shocks and risks can greatly increase vulnerability. This is the antithe-sis of sustainability (in an ecological, social and economic sense) (Devereux 2002) and appears to be a consequence of political and institutional failures both at national and international levels.

7 Regional and International Institution Building Initiatives

Institutions in Africa, particularly with regard to their impact on agriculture, have gained a bad reputation. The monopoly marketing boards have been singled out for criticism for their inability to be effective in channelling agricultural surplus. There are also allega-tions against national planning models, state bureaucrats and urban élites, who imposed domestic terms of trade that kept agricultural prices low (in relation to industrial goods) and the unfavourable domestic terms of trade resulted in an forced saving being im-posed on the agricultural sector.

7.1 Urban Bias The poor performance of the agricultural sector has also been attributed to the phe-nomenon of urban bias in Africa, in which a disproportionate share of national resources and investments has been ploughed into cities and industrialisation, while agriculture has received inadequate resources.41 The ability of urban élites to syphon funds from

38 The developmental state is characterised by a powerful, competent and insulated bureaucracy

(Leftwich, 1995) while the fragile or failing state is regarded as being mired in political and pol-icy disasters (Mkandawire, 1998; Mbabazi and Taylor, 2005).

39 The demobilisation process requires provision to be made for employment and assimiliation, and this was undertaken with due care in Europe after both World Wars.

40 It is a network of systems analysing and disseminating information regarding people who are food insecure or vulnerable to being food insecure and assessing the degree to which the liveli-hoods approach can be used in estimating global data of the undernourished.

41 In 2008, Sub-Saharan Africa reached the turning point with regard to urbanisation as over fifty per cent of its population was now residing in urban areas. The UNU-WIDER Project Workshop, Beyond the Tipping Point: African Development in an Urban World in Cape Town, South Africa,


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rural areas, and to introduce forms of forced taxation, i.e., through administered prices with adverse terms of trade between industry and agriculture, is a major contribution to this feature of development. The phenomenon was given significant attention by Lipton (1977): and “urban bias” was not an economic phenomenon; instead, it was the conse-quence of urban élites, both industrialists and bureaucrats, so that “resource allocations, within the city and the village, as well as between them, reflect urban priorities rather than equity or efficiency”. Lipton (1977:13)

The institutional basis of such mechanisms of discrimination against African agricul-ture also formed the basis of Bates’ (1981) analysis of the differential performance of agriculture in Kenya and Tanzania. The negative impact of long periods of under-investment in agriculture on the incomes, even the continued survival of the African smallholder farmer, has become a particular concern (Haggblade and Gabre-Mahdin, 2003; Bryceson, 2002).

There have been advances in understanding the long-standing impact of institutions in developing countries,42 with a recent econometric study which indicates that, while the co-efficients of post-colonial democratic institutions and population density are both negative and highly significant, the negative relationship between GDP per capita and urban bias was not robust in size or significance (Bezemer and Headey, (2008). How-ever, there are concerns that an institutional analysis for African agriculture should not be based upon any direct comparison with structures that characterise agricultural per-formance in Asia or in Latin America, as they have very different historical and geo-graphical specificities (Diao et al., 2006).43

7.2 Regional Institution-Building Initiatives Agricultural development has been shown to have a stronger effect on poverty reduction than other sectors of the economy (Bresciani & Valdes, 2007). African governments have also begun to re-assess the role of agriculture as a key sector to assist in the achievement of the Millinnium Development Goals. In this regard, the African Union Maputo Declaration of 2003 set out a number of objectives to be achieved within five years, most notably, the allocation of at least 10 per cent of national budgetary re-sources to agriculture. In the wake of this declaration, most African countries’ national agriculture development plans now incorporate recommendations from the Comprehen-sive Africa Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP) document of the New Partner-ship for Africa’s Development (NEPAD 2005). Despite the declaration, many countries still cannot meet the target, and the low commitment by domestic governments contra-dicts the evidence based upon the rate of return, which indicates that, while still lower than other developing regions, the median level of returns from agricultural research is 36% for African countries (Alston et al., 2000).

In fact, the reduced investment in agriculture by international donors has been ac-companied by government budgets that have shown a declining trend to support agricul-ture, and the share of government expenditure in agriculture has continued to remain at the level of 7% to 8% (Fan and Rao 2003). Odhiambo (2007) has pointed out that the under-investment in the agriculture sector of African countries is linked to both shifts within domestic élite politics as well as donor perceptions of the poor returns from in-

26-28 June 2008 provided a forum for discussion of the implications of development in an in-creasingly urban Africa.

42 Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2001) estimate the importance of the colonial institutions in determining growth and urbanisation.

43 Diao et al., (2006) also raised concerns about the limited usefulness of the Asian model of agri-cultural development for African economies, and the importance of research that works with differences in ecologies, types of agrarian relations and land ownership have increasingly be-come the subject of research in agriculture (see Doward 2002).


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vesting in African agriculture.44 However, despite the positive return, the financial sup-port (both domestic and international) to agricultural research has declined, and mecha-nisms for sustaining support have failed to materialise (Rukuni et al. 1998; Eicher 1989). The exception is provided by countries such as Kenya, where increased domestic and international investment has occurred due to the strong commercialising influence of domestic élites (Olukoshi, 2005; Rangnekar 2008).

There has been considerable support for investment in the agriculture sector in recent international flagship reports.45 Biotechnology has emerged as a new focus for research and technology, since 1992, and the Declaration of Agenda 21, the action programme of the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development was held in Rio de Janeiro. Mnyulwa and Mugwagwa (2005) argue that Africa is, without doubt, the least developed region, and should, therefore, be the priority region for new biotechnological research. However, Juma and Serageldin (2007) show that, to date, biotechnology has failed to take root in Africa: modern biotechnological techniques, which include genetic engineering, are employed in few African countries, which include Malawi, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mauritius and Zambia. With the exception of South Africa, which has reached the commercilisation state concerning genetic engineering products, the rest are all at the stage of laboratory research. The interest in biotechnology follows from recent initia-tives to bring a New Green Revolution to Africa, to make up for the failure of the earlier version that was prevalent in the 1960s and the 1970s. The Alliance for Green Revolu-tion in Africa (AGRA) was established by the Rockfeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2006 with the intention of bringing the Green Revolution to African agriculture.

While these regional and international initiatives are laudable, there is concern that these, too, will fail, due to an unwillingness to learn from earlier mistakes; the errors associated adopting a one-size-fits-all approach to technological solutions, the failure to take account of African specificities, or the adoption of ecologically unsustainable pro-duction systems (Scoones 2001). There are also worries that simply building new insti-tutions when the record of existing institutions, particularly in the research and devel-opment sector, has been rather dismal, is a recipe for further development disasters. Research and technology in African agriculture has been, and remains, the domain of the national agricultural institutes, and, with the rise of new African initiatives for agri-cultural development, the National Agricultural Research Systems (NARS) have been looked to as the appropriate organisational vehicle to take new initiatives forward. How-ever, these plans are often models transferred from other areas, which do not take the context specificity of African countries into account (Fakir 2003). Such rough and ready methods are reminiscent of the past forty years of technical heavy-handedness, and there should be considerable caution and critical evaluation before proceeding to con-tinue to use the technical-scientific approach to agricultural production. There is the im-minent danger that smallholder innovations will continue to be overlooked (Haggblade and Gabre-Madhin 2004), as has the promotion of local materials by women farmers based upon community consultations (Duncan, 1997).46 Chema, Gilbert and Roseboo (2003), note that the NARS reform agenda in Africa has experienced significant changes in recent years with a more decentralised approach to agricultural research being devel-

44 Since the 1990s, donor contribution to the agricultural sector has dropped dramatically with

official development assistance (ODA) decreased by two thirds from US$ 6.2 billion to US$ 3.2 billion between 1980 to 2002 and share of agriculture in total ODA fell from 17 per cent to as low as 3.7 per cent for the same period (Odhiambo 2007:2).

45 The World Bank 2008 Report on Agriculture pointed to the importance of technology as a way for African economies. The EU Communication of 2006 and the FSTP documents that followed placed technical support as the first priority of the new engagement with Africa.

46 Expanding the focus of technologies to those used by smallholders, particularly those used by women on women-owned plots, would reduce inequity and would permit more inclusive growth (which could reduce a source of household and community conflict).


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oped in the new reform agenda. This is considered to be more outward looking, client-oriented, and impact driven. It may also enable a forcing of “operations” to recognise the gender dimension of African agriculture in a way that simple scientific evidence does not (Apt et al., 1998).

While the experience of the technology arena might not be replicable in other parts of the agricultural sector or in the even broader rural economy, it would not be appropriate to postpone regional initiatives until there was an improved state capacity. Kaplan (2009) points out that the strengthening of regional institutions could be the most effec-tive way of changing social dynamics, and might even reduce intergroup rivalries by erecting a supranational umbrella.

The regional organisations would also provide a new basis for African agriculture to work with the WTO Agreement on Agriculture (WTO-AoA). Anderson and Yao (2003) suggested that Sub-Saharan African countries would gain twice as much in welfare terms from participating in trade liberalisation, rather than refusing to make the neces-sary reforms. Osakwe (2007) points out that the longer-term prognosis on African ex-port performance might improve in keeping with the prediction of theoretical models. The recent initiatives of the Africa Group in pushing for the removal of cotton subsidies in the United States, and the call by Western African countries for the removal of tariff barriers on commodity trade underline the power that regional organisations in agricul-tural trade might confer on Sub-Saharan Africa.47 Anderson (2004) suggests low-income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa cannot remain indifferent to the opportunities for multi-lateral trade liberalisation in agriculture. His study points out that African countries should prepare themselves by ensuring that they are more food-secure (i.e., by stockpil-ing more than the minimum food guarantee level), which is a mechanism permitted un-der the WTO AoA, and that this is an area that donors might wish to support both through food aid and through capacity-building.

The current scenario of international trade makes the presence of regional associa-tions appear even more attractive, as the growing presence of global players in African agriculture has raised new concerns. Firstly, the increasing presence of global-value chains and supermarket requirements have made it harder for African peasants in more remote locations and with smaller scales of production to meet the delivery market specifications of regularity and product standardisation (Gibbon and Ponte 2005, McMichael 1994). Those who control critical points along the chain, own established brand-names or have access to shelf-space in supermarkets make most of the profits in global-value chains. (UNCTAD 2008: 51). Secondly, the presence of large international players is seen as tipping the power balance against African agriculture, because trade with the United States and the EU has worked to undermine the position of the small farmer (Rosset, 2006). In particular, the entry of China into the African continent and its entry into the production of cash crops - as recently witnessed in the case of soya bean production in Mozambique - raises questions about whether these engagements might work against international efforts to reduce state fragility (Kaplinsky et al., 2006).

While it is important to recognise that regional institution-building, with or without in-ternational support, is valuable, it is not, in itself, a mantra for success. For such institu-tion-building to be effective, it is necessary that the problems of institution-building that have plagued African countries, particularly the need to understand that state fragility is exacerbated by the contestation of the élites from within and not helped by the inability of multiple donors to ensure harmonisation and coherence in the aid programmes. There is need among all stakeholders to ensure that there is a reciprocal trust-building process that permits dialogue and trans-disciplinary learning (Pouligny 2009).

47 Anderson (2004) argues that it is in the interest of individual countries to engage in the WTO,

but the current global trading rules work against this, so that most African countries effectively face a collective action problem.


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7.3 EU Policy, Institution-building and african agriculture

The European Union leads in the provision of development aid, accounting for 55 per cent of the total aid disbursed, and is a major player in the provision of food aid. Food aid is closely-linked to the need for countries to be food secure, and food security has been a major pillar of EU policy since the mid-1990s. The Council Regulation (EC) No 1292/96 of 27 June 1996 on food-aid policy and food-aid management and special op-erations in support of food security indicated a significant shift in policy that linked the provision of food aid to food security through strengthening institutional features in de-veloping countries. A key directive is provided in the following statement that:

“food aid must be integrated into the developing countries’ policies for the im-provement of their food security, in particular by the establishment of food strate-gies aimed at alleviating poverty and geared to achieving the ultimate goal of making food aid superfluous” (EC COUNCIL REGULATION (EC) No 1292/96)

Article 1 of the Council Regulation made a clear distinction between food aid for hu-manitarian purposes and food aid as a development tool to support the creation of food strategies that foster food security in developing countries, and identifies the latter as the main focus of the EU pillar on food aid and food security. The strong link made in the 1996 regulation between reducing hunger and the nature of food security operations in these countries highlighted the link between poverty, hunger and food insecurity, and was an important precursor to the objective of reducing hunger enunciated as Goal 1 of the Millennium Development Goals.

“The purpose of these operations shall be to support, using the resources avail-able, the framing and execution of a food strategy or other measures fostering the food security of the population concerned and to encourage them to reduce their food dependency and their dependence on food aid, especially in the case of low-income countries with serious food shortages. The operations must help to improve the living standards of the poorest people in the countries concerned.” (EC Council regulation (EC) No 1292/96)

The Regulation provides three main instruments with which to deal with food aid and food security matters: (i) food aid, (ii) operations in support of food security, including technical assistance, and (iii) early warning systems and storage programmes, with over half the funds being allocated to operations.48 There were two channels of programme implementation for each instrument: the direct channel that was implemented by the recipient government, sometimes in partnerships with local organisations (including NGOs), and the indirect aid that was provided through a contract between the EC and agencies such as the UN.49

The comprehensive review of the food aid and food security dimensions of EC food programmes in 2001 provided an important opportunity to review the composition of food aid as well as the instruments that were to be utilised for the allocation of such aid. This review provided the catalyst for a number of fundamental shifts in reframing the relationship between the development and the humanitarian dimensions of food policy. Firstly, there emerged a formal recognition of the need to separate, and therefore disen-tangle, responses to humanitarian crises from operations undertaken to reduce food in-security. This separation of humanitarian and development objectives was also helpful in

48 Evaluation and future orientation of Council Regulation (EC) No. 1292/96 on Food Aid Policy

and Food AidManagement and Special Operations in Support of Food Security, Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council, 2001.

49 The aid was disbursed largely through Food Aid/Food Security Budget Line procedures set up by the EC.


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separating out the short-term (ST), medium-term (MT) and long-term (LT) outcomes of food security programmes that were hitherto difficult to distinguish. Secondly, it permit-ted an intellectual engagement with mechanisms that might help to bring ST, MT, and LT outcomes into line with each other. This is relevant in relation to the weaknesses identified by the EC itself: the underlying weaknesses in the implementation, monitoring and evaluation of food-related policy was identified by the EC review of 2001 to be a consequence of development programmes that had long-term objectives. An external evaluation in 2004 corroborated this finding but also identified the need to link short-term and long-term food policy objectives. In particular, the Linking Relief, Rehabilita-tion and Development (LRRD) strategy, which was developed in 1998, was highlighted as a possible way forward to permit a transition from short-term humanitarian assis-tance to medium-term, and possibly long-term, development strategies.

The importance of distinguishing between the types of food aid needed is most urgent in cases of conflict and post-conflict countries, the majority of which are located in the region of Sub-Saharan Africa. The EU has already identified the urgent need to focus on this dimension in its communication of Strategy for Africa: Towards a Euro-African pact to accelerate Africa’s development, 2005. The importance of linking development policy, through the Development Co-operation, and the security instrument, particularly LRRD has been a key element in directing the new thinking in the EC on the space that food policy and agriculture should occupy in the arena of aid modalities. The shift to thematic programmes, in which food security was identified as one of four key areas, to comple-ment the geographical programmes to strengthen development co-operation further also indicates this new reframing of aid modalities. In particular, the regulation of establish-ing a new financing instrument for development co-operation (REGULATION (EC) No 1905/2006) affirms this thinking.

While these policy advances do work to improve the alignment of ST, MT and LT out-comes, there still remains a need to make greater linkages with the Early Warning Sys-tems and Food Crisis, an area that remains under-developed in the current framework. The new FAO twin track approach provides a way forward in this area as it focuses on supporting livelihoods in the wake of humanitarian crises while simultaneously address-ing the root causes of longer-term insecurity.50 The importance of linking humanitarian security and food security is not fully incorporated into the regulation of 2006. While Ar-ticle 15 of the regulation specifically addresses the financing of food security, and the objective of the FSTP is clearly focused on achieving the first MDGs of reducing poverty by half, by supporting the poorest and most vulnerable, there remains a need to ensure coherence, complementarity and continuity of assistance, including in the transition from relief to development (EU Comm 2006). For the Food Security Thematic Programme (FSTP) to provide a way forward to link fragility and food security in a direct and deter-mined fashion,51 the linking of this programme to a financing instrument for develop-ment co-operation should look more closely at the linkages between the ST, MT and LT dimensions of food security and explicitly identify the institutional implications that de-rive from such linkages.

While it is laudable that the EU Commission has made the intellectual leap of regard-ing food security as a matter for development finance, which is to be linked to humani-tarian, short-term aid, there are still other disconnections with regard to the conceptual frameworks that it has adopted. Article 15 forms the backbone of the FSTP and its first objective (Section (a)) is to contribute to the provision of international public goods, in particular, pro-poor demand driven research and technological innovation, as well as ca-pacity development, scientific and technical South-South and South-North co-operation

50 The lessons from recent case studies (Alnovi et al. 2008) is that ensuring timely injections of

small sums of cash can support meagre livelihoods through a humanitarian crisis. 51 EU policy on managing fragility is also set out in the Goal(s)/Mandate(s)/ToRs as relating to

fragility.


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and twinning (Article 15). This sits better with the role of the EU as an international agency that provides a global dimension such as international security and expertise.52 While this objective underlines the benefits of new technologies and training, with or-ganisational capacity-building from the CGIAR, it does not link to the importance of resil-ience in reducing the vulnerability of households in conflict-prone, and even more so in post-conflict, areas.

Article 15 identifies that EC policies should ensure that state fragility does not become further exacerbated by food insecurity and Section (b) identifies:

“supporting global, continental and regional programmes which notably:(i) support food security information and early warning; (ii) support food security in specific fields such as agriculture, including formulation of regional agricultural policies and access to land, agricultural trade and natural resource management; (iii) promote, strengthen and complement national food security and poverty reduction strate-gies in the short, medium and longer-term; and (iv) support networking of policy experts and non-State actors to foster the global food security agenda.”

These forms of technical support in conjunction with the improved interface between the global and national governments in Africa could be the beginning of a re-assessment of the role of agriculture as a key sector to assist in the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.

The third area identified by Article 15 is that of:

“(c) advocating and advancing the food security agenda. The Community shall continue to address key food security issues in the international debate, and shall promote harmonisation, coherence and alignment of policies and aid delivery modes of development partners and donors. In particular, the promotion of the role of civil society in food security issues should be strengthened.”

Reading (c) in conjunction with the next objective, “(d) addressing food insecurity in exceptional situations of transition and state fragility, playing a central role in linking re-lief, rehabilitation and development”, it is becomes clear that the FSTP thematic pro-gramme interventions see the linkage between protecting assets for rehabilitation as the first step to facilitating a reduction in vulnerability in order to increase the resilience of those affected by food insecurity. To ensure that state institutions work to reduce fragil-ity through the protection of property rights, (and thereby reduce the possibility of Case 3 and Case 6 as identified in Diagram 2), it is necessary that local solutions are obtained through working with partners, both non-state and NGOs, and for this to become the norm in both humanitarian and development work. Finally, the central role of land in conflicts in African countries needs to be taken on board more fully with this programme and framework. While objective (e) of Article 15 states that “developing innovative food security policies, strategies and approaches, and strengthening the potential for their replication and South-South dissemination. Areas for intervention may include agricul-ture, including land reform and land policy, sustainable management of and access to natural resources, food security in relation to rural and local development, including in-frastructure, nutrition, demography and labour, migration, health and education”, this section of the Article has not been developed in any major way in the FSTP in relation to incorporating land reform and land policy in the policy framework. In addition, there has been no attempt to establish the relationship between land distribution and land titling in the EC decisions to link LRRD to development, particularly regarding how to ensure that there is a successful transition from rehabilitation policies to development policies in

52 The International Task Force on Global Public Goods: International public goods address issues

that: i) are important to the international community, ii) cannot, or will not, be adequately ad-dressed by individual countries acting alone, and therefore iii) are addressed collectively on a multilateral basis, by both developed and developing countries.


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fragile states. The grey area around the EC’s position of land and the associated lack of guidance in this critical sphere could be a further cause of inconsistency in the existing interventions.

While both the EU Communication and the FSTP address the need to reduce risk and vulnerability from all sources, price instability, natural disasters and conflicts through access to finance, there is an inadequate focus on the linkages between livelihoods and resilience, on how land ownership and titling can be successfully managed, and on the way forward to identify local solutions and partnerships on the ground that could work to expand and deepen the existing safety-net strategies that are in place. In the absence of greater and more systematic knowledge of the local stakeholders, the informal systems of dispute resolution and reconciliation are not likely to make much headway in reducing agricultural fragility.

Notwithstanding these shortcomings, it is laudable that the FSTP’s main objective hits at the heart of the political and institutional nature of food security.53 It also deals with the “structural causes of food insecurity putting agriculture at the heart of the interna-tional debate on development”.54 The improvement in the disbursement of food aid through the DCI in the thematic programme, the successor of the food security budget line, is also an advance. The express recognition that “addressing food insecurity in ex-ceptional situations of transition and state fragility” through the support to “interven-tions to protect, maintain and recover productive and social assets vital for food security and to facilitate economic integration and longer term rehabilitation” as well as support to “crisis prevention and management, to address vulnerability to shocks and to strengthen people's resilience” (EU COM(2006) 21 final) finally brings out the develop-ment, security and humanitarian dimensions of food security more fully than in earlier frameworks.

In addition, the new financing instrument which replaces the conventional budget line approach to food aid draws on the untapped potential which, across the areas of the Re-lief, Rehabilitation and Development (LRRD) approach, could provide the much needed link between finance and social safety-nets, engaging with in-country stakeholders and informal networks, in order to identify factors of state and societal “fragility”.55 Finally, the directives from the FSTP indicate that the FAO will be the leading agency in such support work, which adds strength to the EU-FAO partnership initiated in 2001. It would also work well as the FAO provides institutional linkages with CGIAR and can operate in conjunction with regional institutions in Africa, particularly the AU and NEPAD.

53 The objective is to be pursued during the period 2007-2010 through the 6 strategic priorities:

Priority 1: supporting research, innovation and information distribution in matters relating to food security, with a special focus on supporting the enhancement of capacities and scientific and technological cooperation; Priority 2: linking information and decision making in order to enhance response strategies; Priority 3: using the potential of continental and regional approaches (support to regional initiatives in Asia and Latin America, as well as continental/regional priorities set out in a new partnership with the African Union); Priority 4: responding to food insecurity in exceptional transition situations as well as in fragile and bankrupt states; Priority 5: promoting innovative approaches; Priority 6: encouraging the advancement of the food security programme, and its harmonisation and alignment with development partners, civil society and donors.

54 The FSTP has a budget of € 925 million for 2007-2010, allocated as follows:Priority 1: €233.1 million (25% of the total); Priority 2: €65 million (7% of the total); Priority 3: €135 million (15% of the total); Priority 4: €267.5 million (29% of the total); Priority 5: €159.2 million (17% of the total); Priority 6: €8 million (1% of the total).

55 The Linking Relief Rehabilitation and Development/Disaster Preparedness and Prevention (LRRD/DPP) Interservice Group was established in February 2003 to take stock of the follow-up of the 2001 Commission Communication on LRRD and to address issues related to LRRD in a more systematic manner. A pilot project in Burundi (3M euros) was to build the state’s capacity to plan, to co-ordinate, to monitor and to evaluate food security policies and programmes.


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8 Conclusions This concept note underlines the difficulties faced by African agriculture in contributing to economic development and political stability. The more established area of develop-ment was beset with low growth of output and productivity, exacerbated by growing and unpredictable instability indices and plagued by limited evidence of trade and diversifica-tion across agricultural commodities. The ecological aspects also indicate that there are diverse sets of agricultural trajectories across regions and crops (both food and com-mercial crops). The poor agricultural record is also linked to the nature of the African state, which has suffered from a variety of capacity limitations and is susceptible to a range of fragilities. The combining of capacity limitations and state fragilities provides a typology against which the agricultural policies and programmes embarked upon by na-tional governments have to be set out and evaluated. In particular, the fractured and incomplete record of land reform, land re-distribution and land-titling in Sub-Saharan Africa has adversely affected dispute resolution and has often been a source of re-igniting conflict. The consequences of poor agricultural performance have also impacted adversely on Africa’s rural poverty, which has increased, accompanied by increased evi-dence of exposure to risk, from shocks and natural hazards, which have resulted in the increased vulnerability for poor households. The policies of social safety-nets, followed by the social-protection framework have been unable to get people successfully out of poverty and into investment and accumulation regimes. The consequence of the unrav-elling of livelihoods has been the growing hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa and a greater need for humanitarian assistance and food aid. The mechanisms of aid provision in hu-manitarian crises are increasingly unable to deal with food crises due to the short-term vision of international donors (who do not pick up early signals of recurrence) and their inability to identify and work with the political and institutional dimensions of food inse-curity. The importance of the concept of resilience in providing a pathway towards sus-tainable livelihoods provides a valuable opportunity for greater effectiveness. With these many challenges posed by the agricultural sector, regional and international initiatives that focus of new institution-builiding are emerging. There is some scepticism that these initiatives are certain to fail on account of the low capacity and high state fragility in the constituent countries. The opportunity provided by these organisations in relation to technology and trade, in particular, should not be under-rated, for they could provide the supranational cement needed to reduce intra-state conflict and enhance co-operation. In this regard, Agenda 15 and the FSTP of the EC provide some promise re-garding the bringing together of ST, MT and LT policies through intertwining develop-ment and humanitarian programmes of food security. Nonetheless, gaps still remain in the framework regarding the methods to employ local expertise and engage with local stakeholders. It is only with such explicit measures that donor agencies can counteract the capacity constraints and fragilities that exist in the agricultural sectors of African economies.


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10 Annexes

10.1 Tables and Figures Table 1. Countries in crisis requiring external assistance 1 (2008: 31 countries)

Nature of Food Insecurity Main Reasons Changes from last report (February 2009)

AFRICA (20 countries) Exceptional shortfall in aggregate food production/supplies

Kenya Lingering effects of civil strife, adverse weather

Lesotho Low productivity, HIV/AIDS pandemic

Somalia Conflict, economic crisis, adverse weather Swaziland Low productivity, HIV/AIDS pandemic Zimbabwe Deepening economic crisis Widespread lack of access

Eritrea IDPs, economic constraints Liberia War related damage, pests Mauritania Several years of drought Sierra Leone War related damage Severe localised food insecurity

Burundi Civil strife, IDPs and returnees Central African Republic Refugees, insecurity in parts Chad Refugees, conflict Congo IDPs Côte d'Ivoire Conflict related damage Democratic Republic of Congo Civil strife, returnees Ethiopia Insecurity in parts, localised crop failure Guinea Refugees, conflict related damage Guinea-Bissau Localized insecurity

Sudan Civil strife (Darfur), insecurity (southern Sudan), localised crop failure

Uganda Localised crop failure, insecurity Source: FAO

48


49

Table 2: Agricultural land and agriculture share of GDP.

Agricultural land (% of land area) Agriculture, value added (% of GDP)

Year Year Country 95 96 98 2000 05 06 08 95 96 98 2000 05 06 08 ANGOLA 46 46 46 46 46 .. .. 7 7 13 6 8 9 .. Benin 23 24 28 29 32 .. .. 34 38 38 37 32 .. .. Botswana 46 46 46 46 46 .. .. 4 4 3 2 2 2 .. B’kina Faso 35 35 36 37 40 .. .. 35 39 39 29 34 33 .. Burundi 84 84 88 88 91 .. .. 48 57 46 40 35 .. .. Cameroon 20 20 20 20 20 .. .. 24 24 25 22 20 20 .. Cape Verde 17 17 18 18 18 .. .. 14 13 12 12 9 9 .. Central A.R 8 8 8 8 8 .. .. 46 50 53 53 54 55 .. Chad 38 39 39 39 39 .. .. 36 39 41 42 21 21 .. Comoros 73 74 76 78 80 .. .. 41 41 41 49 51 45 .. Congo DR 10 10 10 10 10 .. .. 57 34 47 50 46 46 .. Congo Rep. 31 31 31 31 31 .. .. 10 9 11 5 5 4 .. Cote d’Ivoir 62 62 62 62 64 .. .. 25 25 24 24 23 23 .. Equ Guinea 12 12 12 12 12 .. .. 52 37 22 10 3 3 .. Eritrea 73 73 74 75 75 .. .. 21 18 26 15 23 25 .. Ethiopia 30 30 31 31 34 .. .. 57 57 53 50 47 48 .. Gabon 20 20 20 20 20 .. .. 8 7 7 6 5 5 .. Gambia The 64 64 68 75 81 .. .. 30 30 28 36 32 30 .. Ghana 58 58 62 64 65 .. .. 39 39 36 35 37 36 .. Guinea 50 50 50 50 51 .. .. 19 18 22 20 20 13 .. Guinea Biss 54 54 56 58 58 .. .. 55 58 62 56 60 62 .. Kenya 48 46 46 47 47 .. .. 31 31 31 32 27 27 .. Lesotho 77 77 77 77 77 .. .. 16 16 17 18 17 16 .. Liberia 27 27 27 27 27 .. .. 82 94 79 72 66 55 .. Madagascar 63 63 66 70 70 .. .. 27 27 31 29 28 27 .. Malawi 41 41 42 43 49 .. .. 30 35 36 40 33 34 .. Mali 29 30 31 32 32 .. .. 50 52 46 42 37 37 .. Mauritania 39 39 39 39 39 .. .. 37 36 31 28 24 13 .. Mauritius 56 56 56 56 56 .. .. 10 10 9 6 6 6 .. Mayotte 51 51 53 53 53 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. Mozambique 61 61 61 61 62 .. .. 35 35 31 24 27 28 .. Namibia 47 47 47 47 47 .. .. 12 12 11 11 12 11 .. Niger 29 29 29 30 30 .. .. 40 39 43 38 .. .. .. Nigeria 80 78 77 77 81 .. .. .. .. .. .. 33 32 .. Rwanda 60 63 65 68 79 .. .. 44 47 46 37 39 41 .. Sao T and P 47 47 49 54 59 .. .. .. .. .. .. 17 .. .. Senegal 41 41 41 42 43 .. .. 21 20 19 19 17 15 .. Seychelles 13 13 13 13 13 .. .. 4 4 3 3 3 3 .. Sierra Leone 38 38 38 38 40 .. .. 43 47 62 58 46 47 .. Somalia 70 70 70 70 71 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. South Africa 82 82 82 82 82 .. .. 4 4 4 3 3 3 .. Sudan 55 55 56 56 58 .. .. 39 44 46 42 32 30 .. Swaziland 78 78 78 81 81 .. .. 12 14 13 12 9 8 .. Tanzania 38 38 38 38 39 .. .. 47 48 45 45 46 45 .. Togo 61 63 65 67 67 .. .. 38 41 35 34 44 .. .. Uganda 62 62 62 62 64 .. .. 49 45 42 30 27 26 .. Zambia 32 33 33 34 35 .. .. 18 18 21 22 22 21 .. Zimbabwe 36 36 37 38 40 .. .. 15 22 22 18 19 .. .. Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2007


Graph 6: Wheat Production in Middle Africa

Middle Africa-Wheat

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Graph 7: Millet Production in Middle Africa

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Source: FAO data

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Graph 8: Maize production in Middle Africa

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Graph 9: Wheat Production in Southern Africa

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Graph 10: Maize Production in Southern Africa

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Graph 11: Millet Production in Southern Africa

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Source: FAO data

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Graph 12: Trend Growth Rates and Instability in Western African Exports

Trend Growth Rates and Instability (1962-2006)

0

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ty In

dex

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Cereals

Coffee + Tea + Cocoa + Sp-07

Graph 13: Trend Growth Rates and Instability in Southern African Exports

Trend Growth Rates and Instability (1962-2006)

0

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ty In

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Coffee + Tea + Cocoa + Sp-07

Source: FAO data

53