Chapter 3. Analytical review of national investment strategies and agricultural policies in West Africa 107
However, the way resources are allocated is perhaps more problematic than mobilizing them. So far,
the largest investments have focused not only on large farms, but also on export sectors. It is urgent
to expand funding availability through the private sector and mechanisms that contribute to mitigate
the many risks that characterize the agricultural sector in general, and in particular traditional sectors,
including products that are rarely or not traded on the international market.
This strategy involves the implementation of funding facilities dedicated to:
a. a guarantee fund to cover part of the risks associated with production (access to inputs), processing
and marketing of products,
b. interest rate subsidies for agricultural and food operation
c. direct subsidies to improve access to equipment and inputs.
ECOWAS’s Fund for Agricultural Development will be housed at the EBID in Lomé and envisions a set
of funding mechanisms that need to be refined and especially relayed at country level and to the actors
involved in developing the agricultural sector. Farmer organizations will be responsible for an important
part of its implementation, including:
- Better characterization and categorization of farms in each country. Defining the optimal size (sur-
face by farmer depending on the area and production) will help achieve the key objectives of the
Regional Agricultural Policy: ensure security and food sovereignty, reduce imbalances between ter-
ritories and ensure farmers “decent incomes”. Characterizing family farms will wisely permit to
differentiate essential public support. - Better structuring of peasant organizations that are currently shared between sector POs, largely
dedicated to economic issues, general POs that focus on advocacy, activist Union POs, and the so
called development POs. The status of all these organizations and their position in intermediation
with other actors, including public authorities and institutions, need to be clearly defined. - Management capacity building of POs in areas where they have had mixed results in recent years,
i.e. economic activities. Indeed, managing grant and improvement mechanisms requires a level of
governance that must be promoted at all levels including POs.
4.2 Guaranteeing access to productive resources: land, water
Beyond institutional and jurisdictional aspects, guaranteeing access to resources for agricultural
development, land and water, raises the thorny issue of managing the demographic transition on
the continent. The debate on land in terms of family farms’ viability and efficiency needs to address:
returns on investment, the ability to respond to the evolution of demand, and their survival, given
how arable land resources are currently managed, including their fragmentation when divided for
inheritance. The emerging need to consolidate land, following concerns to promote biofuel production
and the renewed interest in mechanization to increase productivity, raises a fundamental question: To
which areas will agricultural labor be transferred? (Blein et al, 2008).
Successfully managing the continent’s demographic transition will impact on the success of current
land reforms, or more precisely strategies for securing land tenure, that are being implemented in many
countries to attract productive investments in agriculture. As D. Bloom and Willam (1998) pointed out,
according to the demographic window principle, “every demographic transition, accompanied by an
increased rate of activity, generates a surplus of economic growth. The Asian economic miracle and
the strong growth in Southeast Asia countries are associated with such a strategy”. West Africa will