Case for support for the project on Rising Powers in African agriculture.

General FAC Presentation – overview of research and themes

This twelve-month outreach plan aims to identify/distil key lessons and messages from FAC’s published and ongoing research and use communication channels or “pathways” to target specific agriculture policy stakeholders with these lessons and messages. The timing of outreach activities should coincide with agriculture policy windows (e.g. key conferences, when parliaments are in session, budget deliberations, government consultations on policy, media events, etc.).

By Blessings Chinsinga
February 2007 This case study argues that political context matters in agricultural development issues. No matter what the technical or economic arguments for or against particular policy positions are, it is ultimately the configuration of political interests that influence agricultural policy outcomes on the ground.

1. Soils and Fertilizers – December 2005
2. Will Formalising Property Rights Reduce Poverty? – January 2006
3. Millennium Villages – the solution to African poverty? – June 2006
4. Aid modalities to agriculture – the end of the SWAp? – November 2006
5. Growth linkages in agriculture: single blueprint or multiple trajectories? – Dec. 2006
6. Seasonality: four seasons, four solutions? – April 2007
7. Low External Input and Sustainable Agriculture: Beyond the Hype? – November 2007
8. Can Ethiopia Realise a Better Agriculture in its ‘Third Millennium’? The Role and Dilemma of Farm Prices – October 2007
9. An African Green Revolution? Some personal reflections – October 2007
10. Global Assessments and the Politics of Knowledge: Lessons from the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology – April 2008

Agricultural input subsidies were a common element in agricultural development in poor rural economies in the 1960s and 70s, including successful green revolutions. Although subsidies have continued, to a greater and lesser extent, in some countries, conventional wisdom as well as dominant donor thinking in the 80s and 90s was that subsidies had been ineffective and inefficient policy instruments in Africa, which contributed to government overspending and fiscal and macroeconomic problems.

Early in the new century a consensus on agricultural and rural development emerged that provided renewed impetus to efforts to boost both agricultural development and the rural non-farm economy, in a context of ever closer rural-urban linkages and globalisation. Both governments and donors have committed themselves to support this.

The challenge has been to translate themes into practical policy. For two years the Future Agricultures Consortium, supported by DFID, has been investigating how to do this, primarily in Ethiopia, Kenya and Malawi.

This set of meetings presents of the results of this work. It also includes the World Bank presenting the 2008 World Development Report on Agriculture and Development, and two sessions on the way forward and whether or not emerging challenges from biofuels, climate change, and the growth of China and India imply that the agenda needs radical revision.

The overall context is the alarming decline in the growth of farm output in Kenya over the last fifteen or more years. As Figure 1 shows, from the late 1980s the growth of agricultural production has stagnated and fallen behind population growth. Production per head of population is now slightly below what it was at Independence in 1964.

The modern Kenyan economy has been built on agriculture, starting with the development oflarge-scale commercial farms owned by white settlers in the first half of the C20. Followingthe Swynnerton Plan of 1954, a drive to develop the smaller holdings operated by Africanfarmers began. For almost thirty years thereafter, before and after Independence in 1964,smallholder development in the higher potential parts of Kenya was successfulto drive agricultural growth ahead of the country’s rapid population expansion. Smallholdersincreased notably their output of coffee, tea, pyrethrum, and cotton for export and producedlarge amounts of maize, beans, sugar, beef, and dairy for the domestic market.

Research interests of key members of the Consortium