John M. Staatz

Informing Food Security Decisions in Africa: Empirical Analysis and Policy Dialogue

Discussions of economic and agricultural development in Africa have focused heavily in recent years on structural adjustment, i.e., basic policy changes aimed at allowing international and domestic markets to play a greater role in coordinating national economic activities. Often these structural adjustments and accompanying policies aimed at improving economic performance have been based on several implicit assumptions about how African food systems operate. Yet, for many countries little empirical information has been available to test these assumptions. Hence, designing policies too often becomes an exercise in planning without facts. This paper argues that not only is there a need to base food security and structural adjustment policies more firmly on empirical information, but that the process by which the information is obtained is as important as the information itself. Agricultural economists and other social scientists can, and increasingly should, design policy research in Africa in ways that simultaneously increase effective demand for empirical information as an input into the ongoing policy process and augment African capacity continually to inform policy deliberations. We illustrate the payoffs to such an approach by drawing on selected experience in several African countries (Weber).

Measuring Food Security in Africa: Conceptual, Empirical, and Policy Issues

The definition of food security has broadened since the term first came to prominence at the 1975 World Food Conference. Discussions of food security in the midand late 1970s were strongly influenced by the shortfall in world food production and run-up in prices early in that decade. Initially, food security meant avoiding transitory shortfalls in the aggregate supply of food. By the early 1980s, however, the world food supply situation had evolved markedly. The famines striking Africa took place in a world awash in grain. Clearly, inadequate levels of global food supply were not the cause of hunger. Sens work focused attention on the lack of access by households and individuals to food because of low incomes (entitlements) as a cause of food insecurity, and other research has shown that for most of the hungry in the world, this lack of access is chronic, not transitory. Thus, the conceptual understanding of food insecurity has gradually evolved over the past fifteen years to include not only transitory problems of inadequate supply at the national level but also chronic problems of inadequate access and unequal distribution at the household level. D spite a broader understanding of the complexity of food insecurity, policy makers must still look for easily measured indicators to design programs to reach the food insecure. Often, these indicators are measures of regional or national food supply or its correlates (such as rainfall), as current information on household or individual entitlements to food is usually lacking. S me policy makers may think of supply shortfalls or the lack of domestic food self-suffi-

Cereals market liberalization in Mali

Abstract This paper analyzes the impact of the process of liberalization of cereal markets in Mali. Most consumers, including food-deficient farmers, and private grain traders have benefited from the liberalization. Efforts to tie the liberalization to a minimum support price for farmers failed because the state lacked the resources to guarantee the support price. Furthermore, the ability of different types of farmers and traders to respond to opportunities created by the liberalization has varied widely, depending on their access to productive resources, improved technologies, information, and credit. Economy-wide constraints, such as the insecurity of contracts and liquidity constraints resulting from the failure of the government to pay salaries on time, have further limited the impact of the liberalization.

Analysis of grocery buying and selling practices among manufacturers and distributors: Implications for industry structure and performance

Current buying and selling practices among grocery manufacturers and distributors reduce the efficiency of the food distribution system. This article applies the concept of positive feedback to explain the evolution of the system to its current situation. The study also uses concepts from game theory and transaction-cost economics to explain the persistence of inefficient practices in spite of the potential benefits from alternative forms of transacting. Based on these theoretical concepts, current grocery industry initiatives, such as every day low pricing and efficient consumer response, aimed at creating a lower cost food distribution system, are analyzed.

Confronting the silent challenge of hunger: a conference synthesis

This report is a synthesis of views presented at the Confronting the Silent Challenge of Hunger USAID Conference, June 28-29, 1994. The purposes of the conference were to provide information to assist AID in defining and articulating its development strategy related to agriculture and food security, to identify issues of consensus for incorporation into future AID strategy, and to identify critical issues of ongoing debate which need to be resolved.

Population growth, land allocation and conflict in Mali

ABSTRACT This study analyses the linkages between rural-to-rural migration as measured by rural population growth and land-tenure conflict in southwestern Mali. Land-tenure rules in Mali are characterized by legal pluralism, leading to ambiguity about who has legal access to land and thereby increasing land-related conflicts. Data from 69 communes (townships) show that communes with less land per person tend to have more land-related conflicts. However, localities that have effective means of allocating land and resolving land-tenure disputes have fewer conflicts. A negative association between population growth rates in the destination areas of major migratory flows and the frequency of land-tenure disputes suggests that migrants are ‘voting with their feet’ in choosing to move to communes that have more effective land-conflict resolution processes. Encouraging more cross-community learning about which conflict-resolution processes work well and developing local conventions that allow village-level decision-making regarding land-tenure conflicts may, therefore, help improve migration outcomes for both the migrants and the host communities.

Coordinating cereal farmers and buyers: evidence from Mali

The purpose of this paper is to examine how various transaction-cost characteristics influence the choice of vertical coordination (VC) structures (e.g. different contract types) and horizontal coordination (HC) structures (e.g. different farmer organization types) to link smallholder farmers efficiently with buyers. It analyzes the relationship between vertical and horizontal structures, and the economic sustainability of different structure combinations.,The paper develops a conceptual framework to predict coordination structures as a function of transaction-cost characteristics, compares predictions for the Malian cereals market to empirical evidence using 15 case studies, and then analyzes structure combinations.,Asymmetric scale between farmers and buyers; uncertainty in production, prices, policy, and contract enforcement; and quality and quantity debasement lead to selections of structures with high levels of control. Vertical and horizontal structures demonstrate a complementary relationship in certain core coordination roles, while exhibiting substitutability in the provision of other coordination activities. The marketing cooperative and marketing contract pairing is the most prevalent combination.,The conceptual framework is useful for explaining the selection of coordination structures, and can be applied in other contexts to strengthen external validity.,The framework facilitates predictions and explanation of both VC and HC structures, with empirical application on a country and value chains receiving little attention in the literature.