Food Security Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa

and often ideological level. The results of dozens of supply response studies suggest that without complementary agricultural research, extension, and institutional reforms, price policy is unlikely to have a marked impact on increasing aggregate food production (Helleiner 1975; Eicher and Baker 1982). Agricultural economists can make an important contribution to improved food security in Africa by undertaking micro-level research on the combination of price policies, institutional reforms, and technological packages needed to increase agricultural production and improve the access of the poor to food. (3) Food consumption studies In order to design effective food security programmes, one must first know who the malnourished are, what they eat and why they are hungry. In much of Africa basic information is sparse on the incidence and causes of chronic malnutrition and on the socio-economic characteristics of the malnourished. Methodological advances are needed to design more cost-effective means of gathering such information; traditional nutrition studies usually fail to elicit information on the relationship between income and consumption and conventional income-expenditure studies, especially when conducted in rural areas, are extremely costly. Yet without such information it is impossible to determine the most cost-effective way of increasing caloric intake in a given rural area; is it through improving home food production, reducing post-harvest losses, or expanding non-farm employment, coupled with improvements in the food marketing system? In urban areas, knowledge of the consumption patterns of the poor is needed to design programmes that protect the poor from bearing an undue burden of the painful structural adjustments that many African countries, Ghana and the Sudan, for example, are undergoing, often at the behest of international agencies such as the IMF. ( 4) National food security planning and the design of food strategies A number of African nations have developed national food strategies, often with external technical assistance from the EC. These documents typically outline broad goals for the food system and discuss general approaches to achieving these goals. More work is needed in examining whether the various goals are realistic and mutually consistent and in developing well-conceived strategies and effective implementation plans, including identification of the essential information needed to formulate food security policies. In some countries, food security planning has tended to be an exercise that is rapidly performed by short-term expatriate consultants and rapidly forgotten by government ministries. If this is to change, it is essential that African researchers and government officials be intimately involved in the generation and analysis of data on the food system and in the policy formation and programme design activities. This reinforces the need for donors and African governments to give high priority to developing local institutions to carry out economic policy analysis. Food security policy in sub-Saharan Africa 227 IMPLICATIONS FOR DONORS Beyond underlining the need to maintain food aid flows in the short run to deal with the present crisis, what guidance can be offered to donors? Simply increasing the volume of project-related aid is unlikely to solve African food security problems, because aid flows in many countries are constrained by the lack of absorptive capacity. For example, aid flows per caput in some African states are running at $50 to $75 per year compared with an average of $1.50 per yearin India ver the 1951-70 period (Mellor 1979, p. 89). With a population only 16 per cent the size of Asia's, Africa received $8 billion of Official Development Assistance in 1982-3 from the OECD, OPEC, and the multilateral aid agencies, a larger amount of aid than Asia (excluding the Middle East) received. Kenya, for example, is finding it difficult to manage and impossible to evaluate the 600 projects that are currently being funded by 30 major donors. Rather, there is a need for donors to reconsider the nature of the food insecurity in Africa and the types of programmes and policies required to deal with it. First, in planning longer-run policies, it is important to recognise that food security involves more than just expanded food production and grain reserves; ensuring access of the poor to food means attention has to be given to improving the efficiency of the food system and increasing the real income of the poor through a combination of employment generation, income transfers and redistribution of assets (e.g. access to education). Second, the current emphasis on 'policy dialogue' between donors and African governments, though useful, needs to be based on a better understanding of how the food system in a particular country works. How farmers, merchants and consumers respond to a higher relative price for a given crop is an empirical not an ideological issue; without a better knowledge base, much offood security planning in Africa will continue to be an exercise in 'planning without facts'. Hence, in the longer run, donors can make a major contribution to food security in Africa through helping expand indigenous scientific capacity in both the biological and social sciences, improve the quality of data on the food system and facilitate the development of the African scientific community to deal with both the biological and economic issues underlying food security. Donors should also recognise that policy reforms require time, both to build the domestic political support required to maintain them and to change the expectations of participants in the food system and hence their behaviour. It would be extremely unfortunate if policy reforms needed to improve food security were undermined because donors were impatient about the lack of immediate results.