AGRA's Policy Program

Every day, African countries are demonstrating the key role of policy in putting food on the table and transforming African agriculture. In Malawi, Tanzania and Rwanda for example, polices that have eased farmers’ access to seeds and fertilizer have helped produce bountiful harvests and generate impressive economic growth.

Such changes reflect an emerging consensus among a new generation of African leaders about the importance of providing smallholder farmers with comprehensive policy support. African farmers have long been denied such support, and the results have been stagnant yields and rural poverty. These policies of neglect stand in sharp contrast to those of developed nations, which provide farmers with a strong foundation of government support.

AGRA’s Policy and Partnerships Program increases the capacity of African governments and institutions to develop evidence-based agricultural policies that serve smallholder farmers and are geared to address each country’s circumstances.

To this end, AGRA works with a range of partners, from Ministries of Agriculture and Finance to the African Union’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD).

In November 2009, AGRA and NEPAD launched a partnership to collaborate on achieving an African Green Revolution and the goals set by the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP). Through CAADP, African governments committed to allocating at least 10 percent of their national budgets to agriculture, in pursuit of six percent annual agricultural growth.

Working through national CAADP Roundtable processes, AGRA is helping African governments to develop agricultural investment plans and homegrown policies that can unleash the potential of millions of smallholder farmers.

AGRA supports policy development across the agriculture value chain

In October 2009, AGRA launched a US$15 million Policy Initiative, which focuses on five countries (Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Mozambique, and Tanzania). It facilitates the development of policy in the areas of seeds, soil health, market access, land tenure, and environment and climate change. Throughout all five areas, AGRA pays special attention to issues of gender and equity.

• Policies can improve access to seeds for new high-yield crop varieties by encouraging collaboration between the public research and private seed sectors; harmonizing seed laws and regulations across countries; shortening the time to release new varieties; liberalizing foundation seed production; and eliminating barriers to regional seed trade.
• Policies can help revive African depleted soils by encouraging more farmers to adopt integrated soil fertility management technologies and practices; providing incentives to expand agro-dealer networks; reforming fertilizer tax structures; streamlining national and regional fertilizer procurement practices; and harmonizing fertilizer laws within regional economic communities.
• Policies can play a key role in expanding markets for staple crops by improving market and transport infrastructure; stabilizing market prices for food crops; harmonizing grades and standards for staple crops within regional economic communities; and removing barriers to regional and global trade.
• Policies that clarify land tenure can encourage farmers to invest in improvements required to boost production. Policies are needed to secure land access for smallholder farmers, particularly women farmers who make up the majority of African farmers but rarely own or control the lands they cultivate.
• Policies can help African farmers adapt to and mitigate climate change through: supporting the development of drought-resistant and climate resilient crops; protecting crop biodiversity; promoting Integrated Soil Fertility Management techniques that improve productivity and sequester soil carbon; establishing mechanisms for farmers to participate in carbon markets and other climate-change initiatives; and reducing risk through crop insurance that is linked to weather indexes.

Creating National Policy Hubs

The Initiative helps governments build their policy-making capacity and formulate appropriate agricultural policies. One of its key components is the creation of national policy hubs that bring together analysts, government officials and representatives from farmer groups, civil society, and the private sector to define priorities and develop policies that benefit smallholder farmers and others key players along the agriculture value chain.

The Initiative helps to build expertise and capacity within government Ministries and Parliaments; establishes data banks to inform evidence-based policy development; and supports senior policy fellowships for African agriculture. AGRA grants support various groups involved in the policy-making process.

AGRA’s Policy Initiative builds on other ongoing policy work to develop “smart subsidy” policies in which farm supports are tailored to individual countries, and its Innovative Financing Initiative, which uses credit guarantees to unlock affordable loans for farmers.

Early Accomplishments:

In its first two-and-a-half years, AGRA’s policy successes included: spurring a trend in affordable lending by commercial banks for smallholder based agriculture; helping to shape national approaches to “smart subsidies” that improve smallholder farmers’ access to good seed and fertilizers, while also building the private sector; and promoting reforms in seed regulations to ease collaboration between the public and private sectors.

AGRA’s Innovative Finance Initiative is giving farmers the means to rapidly take advantage of more favorable policy environments. In 2008 alone, AGRA support unlocked $160 million in affordable financing from commercial lenders who were previously reluctant to support smallholder agriculture.

Targeted smart subsidies, aimed at helping resource poor farmers obtain quality seed and fertilizers, have helped transform Malawi from a net importer to a net exporter of maize for four years running, and fueled national economic growth rate of 7 percent. In Rwanda, policies that increased access to seed and fertilizers helped boost food production by 15 percent in 2007 and 16 percent in 2008 – even as millions in neighboring countries were depending on food aid for survival. In Tanzania, similar policy provisions enacted in 2008 enabled 700,000 smallholder farmers in the Southern Highlands to produce five million metric tons of maize, more than any other region of the country.

Find out more about these and other Early Accomplishments.

Agricultural Policy Facts

• African governments signed on to the Comprehensive African Agriculture Develop Program (CAADP) in 2003. It commits countries to investing 10 percent of national budgets in agriculture and pursuing policies that will achieve a 6 percent increase in farm production. As of October 2009, at least seven countries had achieved the 10 percent goal: Malawi, Tanzania, Rwanda, Mali, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Nigeria.
• In 2008, food production in sub-Saharan Africa posted annual growth for first time in decades, rising 3.5 percent, faster than Africa’s population growth of 2 percent.
• Regulatory issues can delay the release of new crop varieties by up to nine years and are a major reason less than one-third of Africa’s smallholder farmers use improved seeds.
• Smallholder farmers’ use only about eight kilograms of fertilizer per hectare of land compared to the global average of 100 kilograms. Policies that encourage regional fertilizer production and procurement and expand agro-dealer networks can increase farmers’ sustainable use of fertilizer.
• Although there is a potential $150 billion regional market for staple food crops, most food produced by smallholders never reaches that market. Policies are needed to expand national, regional and global markets for staple crops.
• In countries such as Ethiopia, more than 60 percent of the price of grain in wholesale markets results from costs associated with transportation and inadequate information.
• Climate change is expected to be particularly harsh for African farmers, most of who rely on rain-fed agriculture and risky agricultural systems. Studies predict that absent dramatic reductions in carbon emissions, in some countries, crop yield may be cut in half. By 2050, six Sahelian countries (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Mali) may not be able to produce maize.