1.
Political Economy of Agricultural Policy in Africa:
Implications for Agrifood System Transformation
Dr. Danielle Resnick, IFPRI
5 November 2020

2.
Agriculture Policy & Political Economy Issues
Price distortions
regime type and interest group influence
Public investments
visibility and attribution by voters of private vs. public goods
Agro-industrial policy
state-business relations and bureaucratic autonomy
Agrifood system transformation
horizontal and vertical coordination
Ideas,
Norms,
Biases,
Ideology

3.
Democratization credited with relative rates of assistance that
favor agriculture over non-agriculture (Bates & Block 2013)
• Malapportionment increases the weight of rural constituents in policy
process (Boone & Wahman 2015)
Trade distortions remain pronounced, particularly for
politically-important grain crops
• 82% of export bans between 1988-2017 occurred since 2000 (Schulz 2020)
Well-organized interest groups lobby for preferred policy
• In Southern Africa, volatile maize restrictions due to balancing interests of
powerful millers, vocal farmers unions, and urban poor
Distortions not bad on their own but need to be strategic rather than
arbitrary and volatile
• Requires strong state capacity and resistance to being hijacked by the
loudest lobby groups, i.e. “embedded autonomy”
Price Distortions
0 5 10 15 20 25
Ethiopia
Mali
Sierra Leone
Burundi
Cameroon
Ghana
Liberia
South Africa
Chad
Rwanda
Uganda
Zambia
Zimbabwe
Tanzania
Senegal
Kenya
Nigeria
Number of events
Export ban Export quota
Export tax Import ban
Import quota Import tariff
Source: FAO’s Food and Agriculture Policy Decision
Analysis (FADPA).
Trade-Related Price Distortions,
2008-2018

4.
Public Investments
Ag research & development (R&D) and extension
receive lower public investments than input
subsidies
• Assumption that politicians prefer high visibility goods for which
they can receive attribution from voters
• Presidential initiatives around inputs, commodities, and
infrastructure are high visibility investments
Budget commitments need to be aligned with
political economy analyses of the budgeting process
• Veto players and opportunities for executive influence
• Decentralization of agriculture to local governments
Decline in ag budgets across districts after
Ghana’s 2012 devolution
Source: Resnick (2018)
Examples of presidential initiatives

5.
Agro-industrial Policy
Targeting of agro-industry tied to whether it benefits
ruling coalition (Kjær 2015; Whitfield et al. 2015)
• Uganda: dairy industry vs. fish processing
• Mozambique: sugar industry vs. fish processing
Successful agro-industrialization requires….
• Capacity to address coordination failures and self-discovery
externalities
• Growth coalitions between business and states
• Strengthened autonomy and accountability of bureaucrats to
implement policies without excessive political interference
Capture
State policy
hijacked by
business
Growth
State and business
cooperate to
increase
investment and
public goods
Collusive
State and
business engage
in pervasive rent
seeking
Predatory
State suppresses
business due to
low trust
Different combinations of
business-state relations
Source: Adapted from Leftwich et al. (2008)

6.
Agrifood Systems Expands Government Role
Illustrative range of government responsibilities for agrifood systems policy agenda

7.
Horizontal & Vertical Coordination
Harmonize multiple policy objectives
• Ensure agro-processing creates jobs but
protects environment
• Investments in ag R&D improves hunger but
does not undermine diets
Cross-sectoral issues
• Expenditures beyond agriculture
• Jurisdiction of ministerial mandates
Multi-level challenges
• Value chains span discrete political authorities in
rural and urban areas
• Cities can have complex institutional oversight of
food system actors, such as informal food
traders
Source: Resnick and Sivasubramanian 2019
Governance of informal food in Accra, Ghana

8.
Conclusions
Political economy permeates any policy decision
• Likely to be more pronounced from an agrifood systems perspective
Strengthening state capabilities requires broader set
of interventions beyond the agricultural sector
• Improve low budget transparency in region
• Build capacity for budgeting and M&E in agri-food ministries
• Support parliamentary ag committees, audit institutions, business
associations
• Learn from public sector experiments with multisectoral agencies,
performance contracts, and delivery units
Low budget transparency in region