2. TRENDS IN AGRICULTURAL POLICY AND PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH
2.1 Evolution of Agricultural Policy: Why Did the Reforms Occur?
Donor thinking on food policy was heavily influenced during the 1980s by the premise that
marketing boards in Africa generally depressed food production by taxing agriculture to support a
cheap food policy (see, for example, World Bank 1981; Cleaver 1985; Bates 1981). This premise
was generally applicable to the coarse grain sectors of West and Central Africa and the non-maize
based regions of Eastern Africa. In these countries, sectoral policy was designed not primarily to
expand local coarse grain production but rather to capture a certain portion of it to meet urban
consumption needs. Urban food security in many cases depended crucially in imported
commodities such as rice and wheat, leading to cheap food for privileged urban consumers and
low food prices for producers (Bates 1981). Imported rice accounted for nearly half of the
calorie consumption in Ouagadougou in the mid-1980s (Reardon, Thiombiano, and Delgado
1988) and more than half the calories of urban Senegalese diets in 1996 (Diagana and Reardon
1997). Moreover, exchange rate overvaluation made rice and especially wheat imports artificially
cheap in much of Francophone West Africa before 1994.2
Food policy evolved in a fundamentally different way in much of Eastern and Southern Africa,
where settler agriculture was prominent during the colonial period. In general, the greater the
importance of European agriculture during the colonial period, the greater the degree of state
intervention in food marketing activities, and the greater the subsidization of selected producers
(Jayne and Jones 1997). The rise of politically powerful farm lobbies has figured prominently in
the determination of agricultural policy, which has in some respects benefitted smallholder as well
as European farming interests (Eicher 1995). Also in contrast to West Africa, urban food security
depended more heavily on domestically-produced cereals, in particular white maize, which was
not readily available on world markets.3 Post-independence food policy in these countries was
strongly driven by (a) the priority put on white maize self-sufficiency given the unreliability of
alternative sources; and (b) the implicit and sometimes explicit “social contract” that the post-
independence governments made with the African majority to redress the neglect of smallholder
agriculture and infrastructural development during the former colonial period. As will be argued
below, the general predictions that policy reform and privatization would stimulate agricultural
production were less accurate in these Eastern and Southern African countries where domestic
cereal production was supported by state activities in credit, input, and output markets.
A common feature of agricultural policy in West, Eastern, and Southern Africa was the generation
of large budget deficits. The state-led models of credit and input distribution and crop sale
2 The impact of currency overvaluation on artificially cheapening rice prices was partially offset,
especially in Mali and Senegal, by taxation of rice imports both to protect local irrigated production (due to
the political importance of "drought-proofing" the Sahel) and to generate government revenues.
3 Jayne et al. (1995) describe the historical, political, and social processes that transformed white maize
from a minor crop into the main staple food of Eastern and Southern Africa over a period of less than six
decades.