By: Wallace Mauggo
Africa is in the headlines again about numerous areas
suffering climate change-induced food shortages, and usually the critical
ingredient is cereals, with the species or variety, depending on local culture,
usage and market factors.
For many years experts have compared food policies in
different African countries to lessons on what works, what doesn’t work and
why. It can’t be said that any generalized were reached that were accepted by
experts of various viewpoints, as each case study used has it drawbacks, and as
Shakespeare reflected, some happy, some sad.
It is rather easy to draw a list of African countries on the
basis of success and failures in their aggro-interventionist or subsidy
policies, usually the lynchpin of suggestions on what to do about in
agriculture generally, or food crops in that sense.
The Maputo Declaration of the African Union set out in 2010
is reputed to have brought African countries to commit about 10% of annual
budgets on the sector, a figure seldom realized and in exceeded by some
countries. It is unclear if the declaration specified interventions with the
cash, as its priorities.
Two or three cases come to mind of policy interventions
within the sub-region or in its immediate proximity, and what can summarily be
said to have been learned, or at least noticed, in those experiences.
The first case study would be located right in Tanzania, the
Kilimo Kwanza policy of 2009, the sort of interventions it pushed ( with the
financing that was also related in part to Tshs. 1.7trillion to uplift the
cotton sector, after world market glut as China cut down cotton imports as its
apparel exports to the US and elsewhere declined). By 2014 there was a maize
glut on the local market, also being felt now; usually closed border trade is
open, to no avail.
Another case is Malawi, which made huge subsidies in its
crop sector and led to massive earnings for its agro-based investments groups,
leading to orchestrated demands for similar privileged treatment from other
sectors.
The result was political breakdown and twilight of the
presidency of Joyce Banda, who failed to get a nod from the voters as she
sought for a second term, in which case the policy was in political terms a failure.
It did not lead to class harmony, national cohesion for a noticeable period of
time, becoming part of disputable allocation of resources.
Still a third case is Kenya, which has never had a
particularly energetic, act of agro-sector intervention, but has arguably the
strongest market structures in the region. The crisis here is proto-climate
change tied up with quasi-nomadic grazing. Period.
The country has lately been in the grip of a profound grain
shortage, accentuated by dysfunctional markets as commercial planters of maize
in Tanzania are likely to be excessively more careful.
More often than not maize sales across the borders are not
permitted, and policy makers only accepted to lift roadblocks due to the glut
and little idea where to send the maize. It means that if markets were
predictable from the start, Tanzania could sell tens of billions of shillings
worth of maize to Kenya.
Back in 1991 as the country continued with the agro-sector
reforms guided by the World Bank, there was a strong institution called the
Marketing Development Bureau within the Ministry of Agriculture that later
disappeared.
AS food stocks rise bureaucrats with solid socialist
intuitions took over with orders as how it should be disposed. Bans on
cross-border trade followed, with permanent production instability as policy
unpredictability rules. It will unabashedly persist.
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