L Rebuilding West Africa’s food potential
amount going to input subsidies, and much less going to research and extension services – the types
of investments widely recognized to have higher payoffs in terms of improved productivity. Expenditure
patterns also show bias towards some export commodities (e.g. cotton) while import substitutes receive
substantial disincentives. Following the food crisis, incentives for thinly traded commodities (maize, millet
and sorghum) worsened, as the government encouraged imports (especially rice), which disadvantaged
producers. The study vividly illustrates the lack of policy coherence between the declared aim of boosting
production and contradictory price policies that discourage domestic supply. Despite heavy public
expenditures on rice, parallel policies facilitating imports benefited consumers but penalized producers
and wholesalers who did not benefit as they should have from high international prices. Studies like
these can have a huge impact on policy design and advance our understanding of the widely recognized
but ill-defined incoherence between domestic and trade food policies.Chapter 6, by Nwuneli, Diaw, Kwadzokpo and Elbehri, moves the focus away from the public sphere and
into private agroprocessing. In this chapter, the authors use several case studies from West Africa to tackle
the questions of how to motivate small and medium-sized agribusinesses to develop food value chains
from the home market, and how to include smallholders in the process. For both questions, the authors
argue that critical policy support is needed to ensure the objectives. Also, government-supported investment
programmes must be inclusive of the small and medium-sized local enterprises that process locally produced
food and contribute to employment. Such measures would have strong implications for trade policies,
requiring harmonization with domestic support measures aimed at stimulating domestic food supply.
Business opportunities for working with smallholders would require that participating producers and their
organizations be market-oriented and selected on a system based on merit and on the ability to deliver on
contractual agreements. Successful partnerships between smallholders and agro-industry require addressing
various risks related to the difficulty of complying with standards and traceability, issues of trust and loyalty
(e.g. side-selling under outgrower schemes) and issues of communication and coordination. In the end,
successful sourcing by agribusinesses from smallholders hinges on the latter being properly organized, with
demonstrated credibility and with sufficient skills to engage in business, trade and economic activities on
behalf of the organization’s members. Policy support for market institutions is a critical element in the process.Chapter 7, by Elbehri, Lee, Hirsch and Benali, delves into the central issue of producer organizations
as market agents and explores how to make them critical players contributing to development of an
inclusive food value chain. Although the need for strengthening producer organizations is often cited
in commodity development analyses, there are few effective approaches that demonstrate how best
to transform producer associations or groups into credible economic agents and reliable business
partners. In this chapter, the authors describe a methodology called GAIN (Governance, Autonomy,
Integration, Needs-based) and present both a diagnostic tool and a transformation pathway to facilitate
smallholder progressive market participation and build the capacity for smallholders to become
effective, credible players in the marketplace. The GAIN methodology follows an iterative approach,
combining an internal “strategic” assessment of the organization with an evaluation of opportunities
for partnership with its immediate potential economic and institutional partners, and derives a road
map for economic self-empowerment. The methodology was successfully applied to several producer
organizations in West Africa, specifically in Burkina Faso, Cameroon and Mali. The authors conclude
that the GAIN methodology is flexible and can be adapted to various organizational situations and
degrees of complexity and can be scaled up to national level and used as part of policy instrument and
institutional reforms.Part II of the book offers a broad range of the value chain case studies, describing traditional export
commodities: cocoa and cotton (Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali); non-traditional, high-value export
crops: horticulture (Senegal) and mangoes (Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana); import-export staples: oil palm