ECOWAS common agricultural policy: 20 years on

Aboubakar Abdul, Tamale, Ghana
January 30, 2024

T he agricultural sector in the West African region is in crisis. Insecurity and malnutrition are increasing in the region and are on track to reach the highest rate in a decade. The World Food Program (WFP) forecasts that food prices will continue to rise in the short term. West African countries are not producing enough to feed their population and must import staple food such as rice, sugar, wheat, and input like fertilizers. Import is necessary for goods and services that are not available at home and can contribute to a transfer of technology. But, import also creates distortions in the regional markets and make local production uncompetitive, while increasing vulnerability to external shocks¹.

In 2020, agriculture in West Africa generated US$259 billion or 35 percent of regional gross domestic product (GDP)². Nigeria alone accounts for 72 percent of this value. By 2030, the region expects agriculture to double and reach over US$473 billion³. Agro-pastoral products are the second largest intra-community trade behind hydrocarbons. Amongst agro-pastoral products, livestock is the largest traded item, with a value of US$340 million. The agricultural sector employs 94 million citizens of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). This represents 61 percent of the labor force. The regional agro-ecology creates natural comparative advantages and complementarities between Sahel and coastal countries⁴. However, over the past two decades, the sector has underperformed, causing malnutrition, famine and poverty to spread.

West Africa Agricultural Policy (WAAP)

Since its inception in 2005, the Economic Community of West Africa Agricultural Policy (WAAP) has developed and implemented policies to boost agricultural production in the region⁵. The goal of WAAP is to ‟meet the food needs of the people” and to contribute to ‟economic, and social development and poverty reduction in the member states”⁶. But the WAAP has failed to reach all its targets. West African countries devote less than 5 percent of their public budget to agriculture, against an official target of 10 percent. Farmers struggle to get their crops to urban markets because of poor transport infrastructure. The WAP promised industrialization in the sector but, limited transformation and storage facilities continue to cause post-harvest losses. FAO estimates from 2011 suggest that as much as 37 percent of food produced in Sub-Saharan Africa is lost between production and consumption⁷. Modernization remains a distant prospect as agricultural practices remain entrenched in archaic practices due to a low penetration of mechanization and biotechnology.

Furthermore, an asymmetry of information causes dysfunctions at the level of the markets⁸. Buyers do not know where to source products and producers cannot identify buyers. After two decades of existence, the WAAP has not created commodities trading exchanges that bring buyers and sellers together and develop a transparent, accessible price system for crops. Instead, West African countries continue to rely the export of raw commodities, especially for cash crops such as coffee, cocoa, cotton, and cashew nuts.

At the institutional level, domestic regulatory obstacles continue to hamper progress. These include low resources mobilization and the inadequate alignment of country and donors program. At the country level, ECOWAP has a limited outreach to the private sector and has little influence on issues related to access to land and gender disparities.

The WAAP struggles to coordinate the implementation of its own policy. For example, the WAAP has established a common tariff system and a Regional Food Security Reserve (RFSR) but faces coordination challenges. Competing and contradictory programs from member countries continue to proliferate.

Need for reform

Endemic failure has forced West Africa to revisit priorities and water down its ambitions, to focus more on a few sub-sectors such as cereal, livestock, and fisheries.

Cereal

In 2023, West Africa produced 76.4 million tons of cereal (up 7 percent compared to 2022). This growth is consistent with a trend that has seen cereal production grow on average by 5 percent over the past decade. However, according to the World Bank, the West Africa’s deficit in cereals is still 9.5 million tons, including four million for Nigeria alone. In the region, demand continues to outstrip production capacity, while import fills the yawning gap. Local rice production, for example, only covers 60 percent of the regional demand. The region depends on import from Asia to cover the remaining 40 percent of the needs. Rice has become the main staple in the region, with the demand growing by 6 percent per year for an annual per capita consumption rate exceeding 100 kg⁹.

Livestock

The rationale for focusing on livestock is that West Africa has considerable advantage, for example the availability of water and vast savanah areas for grazing. According to a continental study by the OECD, the Sahel, and West Africa produce 25 percent of the cattle, 33 percent of the sheep, and 40 percent of the goats of the continent. However, import of frozen poultry, fish, and meat is making local production uncompetitive. The WAAP has not be able to address the chronic lack of modern slaughter houses, processing, and refrigeration systems and reliable electricity supply to run such facilities.

Aquaculture

The West African coastline covers about 6,000 km and snakes along the shores of 14 countries. Nigeria, Senegal and Ghana are the main fish producers in the region, with a combined regional production share of 67.55 percent. Nigeria and Ghana account for 96 precent of aquaculture with combined production of over 389,302 tons¹⁰.

West Africa has some world’s largest water reservoirs (Senegal, Niger, Lake Chad, Volta, Mono, Bandama Sassandra), including the world’s largest man-made lake by area, Lake Volta, with 8,502 km² surface area. West African countries have built over 150 large dams on the region’s rivers. With these investments, they have been able to increase water storage capacity. They can regulate water courses to support irrigation, develop grazing and farming land¹¹. However, despite abundant inland and sea water resources, producers continue to limit their activities to small scale freshwater aquaculture and to few species such as clarias, catfish, tilapia and carps. Dependence on import for feed and new technology is inhibiting the sub-sector and its competitiveness against import of frozen fish.

Operational effectiveness

Without an enforcement mechanism, the operational effectiveness of the WAAP depends the mere will and whimp of member states. Over the past two decades, this lax mechanism has undermined the implementation of policies. For example, only Nigeria and Ghana devote around 10 percent of their public budget to agriculture.

The WAAP needs binding rules to empower its institutions, guarantee transparency in the allocation of resources, waste, and rules to solve conflicts between national, regional and international programs. Other arguments militating for binding rules are demographic pressures, shared resources, waters, and coastal boundaries. The institution needs to reconnect with farmers at the grassroots level.

In West Africa, failed agricultural policies have complex ramifications. They reinforce food insecurity, and also, albeit indirecly, conflicts and even terrorism¹². Other consequences are internal and cross-border migration, pressures on land and poverty. Alone, individual countries cannot resolve the unfolding crisis. On May 18th, 2022, during a call to action meeting on global food security, António Guterres, the UN Secretary General hammered this point when he declared that ‟the food crisis has no respect for borders, and no country can overcome it alone”¹³. Decision makers in the region must heed calls for increased cooperation that are coming from international donors and from the grass roots.

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