Cover_Rebuilding West Africas Food Potential

88 Rebuilding West Africa’s food potential

c. What does (or should) the state do to better regulate the sector and umbrella organizations to enable

them to better fulfill their role within sectors in an integrated manner?

d. What assistance must agricultural policy provide in order to better develop and distribute the necessary

information to actors within food crop sectors?”

1.2 Objectives of the study

The general objective of this work is to undertake a review of national and regional investment policies

and their impact on basic sectors in West Africa. Specifically, the study aims to:

c. make an inventory of the state of development of national policies and investment strategies

for agriculture, deployed by the countries of West Africa, particularly in relation to Pillar II of the

CAADP process on developing competitiveness of the agricultural sectors and market access, and

strengthening the capacity of professional and farmer organizations.

d. examine the role that national policy can play to better facilitate improved restructuring of producer

organizations given the specificity of the different commodity sectors. What types of training and

assistance seem more likely to improve cooperatives’ / CIGs’ economic and technical capacity,

including appropriate regulation of the different umbrella organizations throughout the value

chain (regulating the ethical framework of transformers and agro-industry) and support marketing

of surplus production?

e. analyse through concrete examples of commodity sectors, the means by which policies, investments

or public-private initiatives can help remove bottlenecks in one or more stages of the commodity

sectors, including capitalization constraints, access to means of production and marketing of

products at remunerative prices.

1.3 Methodological approach

This study is mainly based on a literature review of policies and strategies for agricultural development of

West African countries. These policies and strategies are not only numerous and diverse in their essence,

but also tend to change according to circumstances and economic policies that governments are faced

with. Similarly, basic policies are rarely coherent with different emergency plans, as those adopted and

implemented during the food crisis resulting from soaring commodity prices that began in 2007-2008.

However, since 2003, with the commitment of African leaders to allocate at least 10 percent of the

investment budgets of their respective countries to the agricultural sector and the adoption of the

ECOWAP/CAADP regional agricultural policy in 2005, agricultural development strategies are now more

in line with the concerns of stakeholders in the sector. Unlike the old policies, new ones:

a. have been developed through a participatory approach and have resulted in a pact signed between

national actors (state, private sector, farmer organizations and civil society) and technical and financial

partners, accompanied by reciprocal accountability commitments. They are therefore the result of a

constructive dialogue between all stakeholders and take into account the priorities of each one.

b. incorporate better coherence between national, regional and continental levels, according to principles

of complementarity and subsidiarity. There is thus a strong interdependence in terms of the strategic

orientation between national investment plans, regardless of their denomination, and the regional

agricultural investment.

c. are consistent with the Regional Plan, which foresees instruments for policy incentives whose