FinalDraft.TFA-CAADP-PrivateSector.12 26 12€”the“scaling 3up...
Transcript of FinalDraft.TFA-CAADP-PrivateSector.12 26 12€”the“scaling 3up...
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The Private Sector as a Driver for CAADP Implementation
Katrin Kuhlmann, Susan Sechler and Eugene Terry
he decade-‐long Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) process has created a country-‐based framework for agricultural development with widespread support and resource commitments from both
African governments and the donor community. This achievement is more significant than many realize. After decades of underperformance and political obscurity, agriculture and the food industry are now central to broader economic development plans and hold high potential. In particular, they are “expected to contribute to wealth creation and economic growth; to job creation and to increasing opportunities, especially for women and for the youth; to poverty reduction; to food security and improved nutrition; and to resilient societies and economies.”1
However, the widespread implementation of CAADP remains a significant task given the looming challenges facing African agriculture. Those involved in the CAADP process—the country teams, the regional and national support organizations, the donors and other stakeholders—must scale up their work and create tangible results for farmers, businesses and consumers throughout Africa, and they must do so at a faster pace. Today Africa produces less than half of the food required to feed its people. Assuming current levels of growth—and without consideration of the impacts of climate change and diminishing water resources—experts project that figure will be reduced to 13 percent by 2050.2 More advanced commercial systems featuring modern production techniques and far greater market integration are urgently needed in order to increase food production rather than lose more ground.
Demographic changes on the continent also present both challenges and opportunities. Africa’s massive youth bulge is significant—young people aged between 15 and 25 represent more than 60 percent of the continent’s population and 45 percent of its labor force, and are expected to do so for the next 25 years.3 In urban areas, the demand for more, higher-‐quality food is on the rise, offering opportunities for farmers if they can meet the demand for more specialized, higher value-‐added food. If they cannot, Africa’s cities will turn to imported food products, and the opportunity for growth and regional market development will be lost.4
CAADP’s African leadership is well aware of these challenges and is seeking ways to turn them into opportunities that can drive transformational change forward. A final draft summary report, CAADP—Sustaining the Momentum Into the Next Decade (henceforth “CAADP Report”) by the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency (NPCA) rightly lists the desired outcomes from CAADP implementation as increased productivity, competitiveness and regional and global integration. The Report’s goes on to say “It is inconceivable that these objectives can be realized without
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further, radical improvements in agricultural policy and practice, and without substantially higher private and public investment, and more efficient public investment” (emphasis added).5
The purpose of this paper is to discuss ways to build on and supplement CAADP’s achievements thus far and to, as called for by the CAADP report, “ratchet up performance to deliver more certain and substantial results” (emphasis added).6 In particular, we focus on how to stimulate greater and more inclusive investments aimed at growing, expanding and replicating successful business models and practices along food value chains. This will not only most effectively drive more rapid productivity growth but will also lead to improvements in the policy environment and to the more rapid regional integration that successful CAADP implementation will require. Although there are good examples of success with inclusive investment in Africa, many African countries have had only limited exposure to working with private sector investment in agriculture, not all of which has been positive. While there is a growing appreciation of the centrality of business to Africa’s future, it would be useful for CAADP leadership and the donors working on African food security to draw upon a broader and more thoroughly documented range of experiences that could underpin CAADP’s implementation. It will be especially critical to help promote better understanding of what business needs to succeed, where government can most effectively support inclusive investment through appropriate policy action and where business participation in public processes can be most helpful.
Ratcheting up performance and delivering more substantial results will
require a serious push, and a body of work published by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and edited by Johannes Linn details a particularly promising methodology for what they call “scaling up” that has been used successfully to drive transformational development throughout the world. With some adaptation, we think that the “scaling up” approach could help guide a cohesive implementation strategy that would expand CAADP’s influence as well as produce the biggest response in the shortest period of time. It might also help CAADP (and NEPAD) allow for a more rapid set of activities to blossom at the national and locals levels that will lead to transformational change. And, perhaps most importantly, the scholarly work may help donors, many of whom are relatively unfamiliar with Africa, agriculture or business investment, develop more confidence in supporting a mix of private business development and public purpose that would have been unthinkable even a decade or two ago.
Applying this concept of scaling up to implementation of the CAADP
framework would involve focusing on successful pilots, investments and best practices that can be replicated and applied more broadly: “systemic scaling up requires a perspective that sees beyond the traditional project approach…it expands, replicates, adapts and sustains successful policies, programs or projects to reach a greater number of people.”7 This concept is especially important in the African context because it is particularly relevant to the task of building markets and
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increasing private sector involvement in agriculture. It involves both a deep understanding of the particular factors that contributed to the success of a scalable project or investment and an analysis of the broader environment in which it is operating. It is also an inherently interactive rather than stove-‐piped process and will require the type of coordination across and within disciplines that CAADP was mean to encourage. As discussed in the section below on the relationship between the policy environment and increased private sector investment in agriculture, the interplay between institutional, policy and investment strategies is particularly critical to scaling up and moving from pilot to proliferation—the “scaling-‐up pathway”—which “typically involves policy reform and institution building to help achieve the policy and institutional conditions needed for successful . . . scaling up.”8
The discussion below begins with a brief examination of private sector engagement in CAADP’s first decade followed by background on the over-‐arching importance of regional market development and the improvement of policy and business conditions to attracting private sector investment. Recommendations, which are divided into four parts, follow.
The first discusses a new way to increase the effectiveness of public sector
efforts aimed at improving business conditions and removing barriers to trade by using private sector investment opportunities as a push factor to bring about more rapid and beneficial changes in national and regional policies and practices. The second discusses effective public-‐private collaboration to develop and use research products in support of productivity-‐enhancing technologies. The third discusses the role of the public sector in increasing private investment, including risk management strategies and changes to developed country trade policies that impact Africa’s regional market development.
Finally, the recommendations conclude with a section that draws together
the previous three sections and discusses possible mechanisms through which implementation could advance. This section focuses on the regional Development Corridors—noted in the CAADP Report as a concept that has widespread support among the donors.9 As one possibility, a more explicit linkage between the CAADP country teams and the private sector—at the national, regional and global levels—could be achieved through using a combination of donor and private investment funds to create privately-‐run agricultural investment facilities focused on inclusive and efficient investment along several of the more promising transportation and Development Corridors. Another related mechanism would be to support regional value chain hubs through coordinated application of a suite of best practices designed to unlock new market opportunity. Both mechanisms could also provide market-‐based touchdown points for efforts to ensure efficient and equitable policy solutions, including on issues like land use and ownership that thwart investment and limit food security efforts.
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Private Sector Engagement in the CAADP Process To Date
A review of the literature on the role of the private sector as a driver for change in agriculture and food systems strongly supports the contention that increasing private sector investment and engagement in African agricultural and food system development is the best way to propel the CAADP process forward and generate real results.10 Despite increasing private sector investment in Africa, however, a clear correlation cannot be drawn between this activity and the CAADP process.11 Overall, private sector participation in the CAADP process has been limited and somewhat ad hoc, and CAADP’s own reviews report that business feels left out of the process.12
The main vehicle for private sector engagement within CAADP thus far has
been the country planning process, which has worked better in some countries than others. In the Ghana country planning process, business was reportedly fairly engaged. But it has been less engaged in other country processes where the private sector has historically been less well organized. 13 The AU, NEPAD and the World Economic Forum, with donor support and participation, recently launched the Grow Africa Initiative to help facilitate private sector investment in priority value chains and enhance coordination with CAADP.14 Reliable data on its impact are not yet available, however, and reports indicate that its private sector supporters are most heavily concentrated among larger global companies that can play an important role but have different needs and considerations than the growing group of smaller and medium-‐sized businesses in the sector. To spur private sector growth and investment, CAADP’s leadership must find ways to engage and catalyze private sector participants of all sizes along entire value chains.15
The term “private sector” is often used as a broad catch-‐all, but (as Keith
Palmer, founder and Chairman of AgDevCo and InfraCo, Ltd., argues) there are distinctions to be made in understanding the private sector in African agriculture that are particularly relevant to CAADP’s focus moving forward:
The national private sector in agriculture and agribusiness in sub-‐Saharan Africa is made up of three groups: the established larger businesses, small and medium sized enterprises and small holders (family farmers and individual traders). Growth and poverty reduction require that all three of these groups benefit from and contribute to national development … clearly foreign corporate investors also have an important role to play alongside the national private sector. The challenge is to support all three national private sector groups and to create effective partnerships with foreign private investors, host governments and the international development community (emphasis added).16
Successfully using private sector investment to drive CAADP implementation
will require that CAADP country leadership and the donors support new ways of working with the full range of private sector actors. It will also require better approaches to create the kind of policy and enabling environment critical to
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attracting private investment. Both will entail changes in CAADP’s governance and processes, more targeted donor intervention strategies, and enhanced capacity and skills at both the country and regional levels, along with a more concentrated effort to identify solutions to the more intractable problems that are undermining private sector investment, especially by domestic enterprises. The Role of Africa’s Regional Markets and Policy Change in Stimulating Agricultural Development
Private sector actors—whether large companies, small and medium-‐sized enterprises (SMEs) or commercially oriented farmers—base their decision-‐making on the market. In sub-‐Saharan Africa, where many countries are either landlocked and lacking access to ports or so small that local markets cannot provide adequate economic opportunities, most market challenges and solutions are necessarily regional in nature.17 Regional markets offer the economies of scale required to expand business opportunities, foster competitiveness, and connect producers to consumer demand, competitive value chains and—eventually—global markets.
At present, however, Africa’s regional markets are underdeveloped and complex, performing well below their potential. Although a significant portion of agricultural trade is informal and much production doesn’t make it to market, it is still striking that, given the dominance of agriculture in most African economies,18 formal agricultural trade accounts for less than 20 percent of intra-‐African exports.19
Regional trade barriers, infrastructure gaps, weak market systems for
moving high-‐quality seed and other inputs, and lack of appropriate financing mechanisms all contribute to the low level of intra-‐African agricultural trade.20 As the World Bank notes, Africa has “integrated with the rest of the world faster than with itself.”21 It takes longer and costs more to export and import goods in Africa than anywhere else in the world, with more documents and duplicative paperwork required and multiple overlapping policies and agencies involved. Africa’s transport costs are well over twice those of other developing regions.22
Successfully connecting African producers and SMEs to greater opportunities
is not just a matter of efficiency. It is also a matter of equity, which goes to the heart of CAADP’s mandate. 23 With a large segment of Africa’s farmers and their households surviving in what is effectively a closed system—isolated, with poor access to transport, market information and nutritious foods and virtually no incentive to improve their productivity—connecting these farmers to larger markets could significantly enhance health and wellbeing, spur productivity gains and expose farmers to better services, seed varieties and inputs. Weak markets also hamper the creation of much-‐needed job opportunities for Africa’s youth and women, many of whom are hoping to find opportunities beyond the farm. Further, rural areas can benefit from improvements in social safety nets, reduced isolation,
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and social spending made possible by positive economic growth stemming from better functioning markets and improved policies.
Africa’s hard infrastructure challenges—lack of sufficient and high-‐quality
roads, bridges, highways, storage facilities, etc.—are well documented and impact businesses of all kinds and sizes in Africa, a continent with three-‐and-‐a-‐half times the landmass of the United States and few navigable rivers. Historically, where funds have existed to improve infrastructure, much money has been wasted without a sound economic justification: roads were built that did not connect markets to centers of production, and ports were provided with the wrong equipment that still lies idle.24 Furthermore, and of very direct concern to the 600 million Africans in farm families, analysts estimate that no more than 20 percent of public investment in infrastructure has gone to rural areas.25 Absent new forms of public-‐private intervention that generate infrastructure investment linking rural areas to the cities, urban areas will become even more of a focus and the rural areas that need infrastructure the most will become increasingly isolated.
But while hard infrastructure constraints are very real, most of the market
barriers CAADP identifies as priorities for agriculture and food security fall under the category of “soft infrastructure.” A weak policy environment accounts for three quarters of the delays and difficulties in regional trade,26 and these burdens weigh most heavily on the agricultural sector.27 Multiple checkpoints along transport routes run up costs and hamper trade in many farm products, including cotton, fruits and vegetables.28 For example, an additional day’s delay due to transport and customs issues can reduce exports of time-‐sensitive agricultural goods by seven percent. 29 Delays can also lead to spoilage and additional costs through warehousing or port payments, along with the need to maintain extra inventory.
Addressing soft infrastructure barriers requires a number of interconnected
steps, among them: improving and enforcing laws and regulations; establishing more efficient and transparent customs procedures and other measures for facilitating trade; improving certification systems and procedures for ensuring food safety; and enacting and enforcing policies to make better quality and higher yielding seeds available through market channels. All of these are essential to CAADP implementation, the production goals at the heart of the global food security initiative and the market development interests of both the public and private sectors.
However, despite numerous agreements to the contrary—including the
detailed agreements for free trade areas and customs unions that underpin Africa’s RECs—progress in removing the soft barriers to regional market development in most regions in sub-‐Saharan Africa has been slow and inconsistent. African national policies would be better aligned if regional agreements were better enforced,30 but these agreements lack enforceability mechanisms to begin with.31 Not surprisingly, the results are detrimental to market development and regional integration. For example, in many African regions countries have neither harmonized sanitary and
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phytosanitary (SPS) regimes nor do they recognize the regulatory inspection processes of neighboring countries. The resulting overlapping regulatory regimes are often duplicative, poorly enforced and difficult for businesses to navigate. Recommended Actions to Drive Private Sector Investment in Agricultural Development (1) Opening Markets Through Opportunity-‐Driven Policy Change
Ultimately, strengthening regional markets will depend largely upon a real-‐time, direct connection between high-‐level policymaking processes and the entrepreneurs and businesses that hold the potential for driving inclusive agricultural development. In order to both have an impact and be scalable, this opportunity-‐driven approach to strengthen market conditions and jump-‐start private sector investment must start with specific investment opportunities and the barriers that stand in their way and then work back up to the policy level, instead of waiting for transformational change to occur the other way around.
The large public-‐led policy processes tasked with improving Africa’s regional
markets have had limited success in changing the enabling environment for business. This is in part because the link between economic gain and policy change is not always directly articulated or perceived, resulting in weak incentives for policymakers—at both the political and technical levels—to change policies or practices. The fear of doing the wrong thing often far outweighs the possibility of success, and inaction is many times the norm. In addition, data on market opportunities and factors impeding them are sparse and diffuse, and many pressing for market development have lacked both information and accountability. While political will remains critical, lasting policy change in the agricultural sector will depend upon the ability to identify what is possible in the market,32 as signaled by a concrete market opening and demand for new investment, growth or diversification, and then move step by step up the policy chain to identify and address specific barriers or gaps that may hinder that opportunity.
The need for an opportunity-‐driven approach to policy change33 is supported by the literature on Africa’s regional trade. A recent World Bank report on “Defragmenting Africa” echoes the approach in calling for regional integration to go beyond tariff reduction to address “on-‐the-‐ground constraints that paralyze the daily operations of producers and traders.”34 Francesco Rampa of the European Centre for Development Policy Management (EDCPM) calls for “pragmatic efforts towards regional integration” that go beyond “broad regional policy frameworks . . . [to] target the development of business-‐oriented transport and regulatory systems for specific sectors.”35 In “Agribusiness for Africa’s Prosperity,” UNIDO presents an approach that analyzes productive potential along entire value chains, identifying weak links and policy and investment constraints.36
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Numerous examples in practice underline the need for this approach and demonstrate its potential for success. These include the difficulties in unlocking horticultural opportunities along the Beira Corridor in Mozambique due to bureaucratic constraints; 37 limitations on agricultural opportunities along the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT) due to taxes, regulatory hurdles and government red tape;38 and the need for measures to revitalize the cotton sector in Ghana, including policy changes.39
One example highlighting how real policy change can be delivered through the opportunity-‐driven approach and redound to the benefit of the community as a whole is Mtanga Farms in Tanzania, where such a model was adopted to jumpstart a successful seed potato industry (see Box 1). The investment, policy and agricultural team that worked with the entrepreneurs at Mtanga Farms, which included the authors, isolated and addressed the technological, legal and regulatory barriers impeding progress towards establishment of the enterprise. Removing these barriers required a targeted and sequenced approach starting with knowledge sharing and identifying the actions to be taken. This success has been reported and adopted throughout Tanzania and Kenya. Collaboration with Tanzanian and Kenyan regulatory organizations has increased, and the results of these interventions are being shared with investors and policymakers in Africa, the United States and Europe.
Box 1 The Case of Mtanga Farms
The opportunity around which Mtanga Farms was built came from a group of African entrepreneurs, Jillanjo Ltd., with extensive experience working with small farmers to create inclusive, commercial, and profitable agriculture-‐based enterprises. Before Jillanjo entered the market some 150,000 smallholder farmers, many of them women, were growing potatoes in Tanzania. Yet these farmers were only getting one-‐fifth to one-‐tenth of potential global yields, which meant that they barely grew enough potatoes for home consumption and had none to supply the growing consumer market in Tanzania. In particular, there was no source of commercial quantities of healthy, disease-‐free, high-‐yielding potato seed stock. With potatoes being trucked in from South Africa to meet the market demands in Dar es Salaam, however, the market opportunity was clear. The opportunity was identified and investigated, due diligence completed, and the first investment made. However, Jillanjo found that they were unable to obtain the advanced disease-‐free seed of improved potato varieties necessary to make the business work due to a complex web of technical, legal and regulatory hurdles. Opening the Tanzanian market required taking one concrete step after another to address these obstacles and applying a hybrid approach that combined highly technical expertise with political and policy understanding to identify and remove barriers. It also required working up and down the “policy value chain” with a significant number of local, state, regional and international public entities. Today Mtanga Farms is a thriving, inclusive, mixed-‐use commercial enterprise, with a commercial greenhouse-‐based seed potato business that directly employs
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upwards of 150 women and plans to sell improved potato seed to producers throughout Tanzania, enabling them to produce and sell potatoes for home consumption in the growing regional market around Dar es Salaam. Because of the inclusive approach taken with Mtanga Farms, the lessons learned have been spread to other investors and regulators. This opportunity-‐driven approach has significant room for scale-‐up with other investments, making it very relevant to the goals of CAADP’s implementation. For a more detailed discussion, see the case study of Mtanga Farms done by the Global Impact Investing Network.40
In order to scale up this approach, particular attention will need to be placed on ensuring both that the voice of the private sector is appropriately diverse and that the benefits of policy change take root at the community level—critical to establishing the rule of law—which will require focus on the particular needs of small farmers, women and others largely left out of market systems. This would result in better inclusivity and could facilitate access to voices beyond the large companies that have historically been more effective at getting governments to address the barriers they face. Doing so would also both better reflect the needs of the market and capture the efficiency and equity gains noted above.
As this approach is expanded, it should also be combined with targeted public sector support, capacity building interventions and better mechanisms for engaging the private sector. Undoubtedly, support is needed to strengthen African institutions, such as the RECs, and build up scientific and technical capabilities within these institutions. As an overarching principle, however, these interventions should be designed and carried out in a manner that will support increased commercial activity. Doing so will not only strengthen mechanisms for collaboration between the public and private sectors to generate more inclusive investment in African agriculture, it will also strengthen markets themselves. These are all fundamental requirements for the opportunity-‐driven approach and are discussed in more detail in the sections below.
(2) Establishing Partnerships to Promote Faster Dissemination and Uptake of
Public and Private Research Products
Private sector engagement in the CAADP process could be strengthened considerably, and inclusive commercialization propelled forward, by the creation of public-‐private collaboration aimed at bringing the best of both sectors together to promote CAADP’s goals. This is especially important in the development and use of research products, where both sectors have an important role to play.
In virtually all successful food systems that function at scale, the private sector plays a key role in the development of new technologies, the provision of essential services, and access to markets. The success of development efforts that integrate the private sector can be seen through the significant impact on millions of small producers of seeds and crop protection products, fertilizers, communications technology (e.g. mobile phones) and agricultural machinery and tools.
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Without public support, however, much of the private sector investment in
African agriculture will flow to more market-‐ready commercial parts of the agriculture system and to models that are not optimally pro-‐poor or beneficial to CAADP’s overall goals. On the other hand, if public sector support is isolated from market forces (as it has been traditionally), it too will not serve CAADP’s goals of wealth generation, poverty alleviation, economic growth, job creation and regional integration.
Successfully combining public goods investments and private sector know how and dissemination capacities is critical to business formation, increased productivity, new value-‐added activities and market development. This is especially true in “pre-‐commercial” circumstances and areas in which there are large numbers of subsistence farmers, and where private companies and public institutions lack the resources or incentives to fully develop products or exploit their assets independently. Systematic interventions to promote public-‐private collaboration can improve the functioning of value chains and create synergies in technology generation such as in genetics, plant breeding, soil fertility solutions, crop protection, irrigation and mechanization. In turn, all of these can help attract more private sector engagement.
Molecular breeding presents especially good opportunities to use partnerships between the public and private sector at the national level to spur institutional reforms while realizing CAADP’s goals. To strengthen crop breeding programs, for example, there is a good distribution of comparative advantages. The international agricultural research centers (CGIAR) and the national programs are strong at phenotyping—using experienced observation to score for the presence or absence of traits in a population of crop plants grown in the field—while crop science companies have the advanced laboratories and databases necessary to do geneotyping—scoring the same plants for the presence or absence of known DNA sequences and segments, including alternative versions of specific genes. Used in concert, phenotyping and geneotyping can speed the development of crop varieties with traits important to African farmers. One example of successful collaboration in this area is the African Agriculture Technology Foundation (AATF), which bridges the transfer of technology from the public to private sector (see Box 2).
Box 2
The African Agriculture Technology Foundation
AATF is a public-‐private partnership created to serve as an honest broker in negotiating for royalty-‐free transfer of technologies held by public and private organizations in industrialized and developing countries to smallholder farmers in Africa. It is a good example of an Africa-‐based and owned institution with a public-‐private mandate that is worthy of replication. Based in Kenya and created with support from the Rockefeller Foundation and others, AATF also has strong support from global seed companies. Its mission is to provide African farmers with access to existing technologies and improved
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germplasm from the private sector that are not available in Africa and to reduce costs and speed up adaptation and use. With its close connections to the private sector AATF can respond to farmer “demand” and access technologies not available in Africa that can address intractable problems such as Striga, a plant parasitic weed that significantly reduced yields of infested crops. The Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) initiative is a multilateral consortium led by AATF. This project was designed to use marker-‐assisted breeding and biotechnology to develop African maize varieties with the long-‐term goal of making drought-‐tolerant maize available royalty-‐free to African small-‐scale farmers.
Public-‐private arrangements between business-‐oriented NGOs and the
private sector can also be important to implementing and scaling up the opportunity-‐driven model for policy change described above. For example, a recent report for the Ford Foundation by the Sustainable Food Lab, a business-‐oriented NGO, examines how to make specific value chains work for poor farmers. 41 Using the study to create collaborative “learning by doing” opportunities for country level teams working with business could be one way to build country level capacity. However, this would require an unprecedented collaboration among CAADP leadership, the NGOs, the donors and the private sector. Opportunities to expand production, create businesses and reach regional markets can also be supported through creative new mapping technologies that identify trade opportunities based on capabilities and conditions required to develop new products and show where value could be added based on skill, level of development and growing conditions. For example, the “Product Space” methodology developed by the MIT Media Lab and Harvard’s Kennedy School Center for International Development and housed within the Observatory of Economic Complexity identifies untapped market potential through comprehensively mapping the products countries are—and could be—producing based on existing economic and institutional capabilities.42
As a way to strengthen national scientific capacity in African countries and ensure that the publicly supported innovations are tested and adapted for small farmers in the precise ecosystem in which they will be used, the CGIAR centers work mainly through the National Agriculture Research Institutions (NARS). The NARS often do not have the capacity to further improve or test new seeds, and, as a result, the improved varieties frequently languish on the shelf. Changing this will require new approaches to public goods, including the creation of new public-‐private entities and private sector businesses capable of reaching African farmers. Models that invest in and disseminate more productive technology, such as new higher yielding seeds, carry the promise of great benefit but also come with risk that must be mitigated through appropriate public sector interventions. Such investments are especially important in Africa where so many farmers depend on “orphan” crops such as cassava that do not supply adequate nutrition for healthy growth and development. The preponderance of work on these crops is being conducted by the international crop research facilities in the CGIAR system, whose mechanisms for
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getting them to farmers are for the most part too restrictive to allow for rapid uptake and business formation. (See Box 3)
Box 3
Seeds2B—Promoting Small-‐Scale Seed Commercialization
Recognizing the need to move improved seed varieties from the shelves of the CGIAR into the market and building on the capacity of the AATF, the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture (SFSA) has developed Seeds2B, an initiative that will work with AATF to promote small-‐scale commercialization of seed of improved varieties of staple and other crop commodities. Seeds2B will use new risk mitigation tools and new licensing models and work on trade harmonization to demonstrate to African farmers and small seed companies that it is possible to earn a profit from selling improved seeds for a wide range of crops. The relationship with AATF is being developed with technical support from SFSA’s Africa Seed Program in seed handling and risk management. Seeds2B will partner with the AATF and others to develop the capacity to manage the transfer of new high-‐yielding seeds from public and private breeders into the hands of African seed companies and farmers in commercial quantities through market channels. SFSA’s exit strategy envisions leaving behind Seeds2B as a new for-‐profit enterprise that will bridge the gap between the public and private sectors and promote the release of new varieties for small-‐scale commercialization. It is envisaged that this will result in greater incentives for trade harmonization among countries, and the creation of new models for seed licensing and risk mitigation. It will also add a much-‐needed, for-‐profit arm to AATF that can use the revenues these services generate to make its own sources of support more sustainable.
Leadership of CAADP, the AU and NEPAD are all well aware that the
transformation of African agriculture will require much more strategic development of Knowledge, Information and Skills (KIS) support systems for CAADP processes (sector investment planning and implementation) at the country and regional levels. These CAADP processes must have at their core evidence–based quality data and information, as well as capacity and skill for analysis. New public-‐private initiatives, therefore, must be structured to improve the research, information and knowledge base that underpins the CAADP effort. After years of underinvestment by both African leadership and the donors in research and development, both must forge expanded (and replicable) public-‐private collaborations capable of filling the gap in research institutions, market information sources and other knowledge. The Strategic Analysis and Knowledge Support Systems (SAKSS) initiatives at the national level, and ReSAKSS initiatives at the regional level, have been useful in this context, and aspects of these programs should be extended to capture data on business environment and on producer, input and output markets performance, as well as on the political economy of agriculture.43
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(3) Leveraging Private Sector Investment Through Donor Programs and Policies
Transforming African agriculture, one of CAADP’s overarching goals, will require many times more investment capital than is available through all of the donors and impact investors combined. Accordingly, successful implementation of CAADP will require acceleration of the pace, scale and density of commercial investment in African agriculture and food systems. This cannot happen, however, without change on the part of both the bilateral and multilateral donors to focus their programs on the type of investment support Africa needs to leverage enough private sector investment to meet CAADP’s ambitious goals.
The Role of the Donors in Enabling Private Sector Investment
Investment has increasingly become an area of focus for the bilateral donors, and many are actively working to figure out ways to “invest” rather than rely solely on more traditional interventions such as grant making and contracts with development organizations and non-‐profits. In many bilateral donor agencies, the internal agricultural expertise has diminished and the necessary skills and mechanisms for investment decisions and programming have not been developed. Nevertheless, many bilateral agencies are under political pressure to show results quickly. And many of them are stuck in a “cameo project” mentality rather than a systemic one, at the expense of a more dynamic and appropriate role in leveraging new agricultural investment. Because they lack the track record with private sector investment strategies, the bilateral donors have not yet developed a consistent set of appropriate public sector interventions to support the private sector activities of investment funds and business-‐oriented non-‐profit institutions.
For example, tailoring donor interventions—whether at the bilateral or
multilateral level—to catalyze investment opportunities and bridge the public goods gap is essential to generating more business activity. All sectors thrive on successful replication and density, and agriculture is no exception. Africa will need thousands of successful commercial SMEs in the agricultural sector to make CAADP implementation work. Success will bring with it more success, with the more viable SMEs being emulated by others, as has happened in the technology sector. However, even the successful medium-‐scale agricultural entrepreneurs who can operate both commercially in both local and regional markets have trouble securing financing on reasonable terms, especially if they use “inclusive” models that involve small farmers in their business plans as workers, partners, or customers. Tested models for expanding access to and availability of private sector technologies for use by African farmers currently remain few and far between, with donors reluctant to channel support to replicate these models.
Bilateral donors could also play a particularly significant role in leveraging
private sector investment and supporting business formation in pre-‐commercial areas where capital will not necessarily flow. The donors are in the unique position
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of being able to use resources—while remaining unencumbered by the need to make a profit—to develop new tools and models that promote sustainability, wealth accumulation, inclusivity and efficiency. And they are well positioned to ensure that investments are complemented by interventions to spread the benefits so the public good is maximized. While donors must be careful not to skew investments away from sustainability and profitability, they can provide the kinds of services needed to build strong food systems that that have been the backbone for the commercialization of agriculture in developed countries.
Expanded support for risk management tools is also critical. This would help
businesses invest in riskier, more inclusive models for commercial agricultural production and related food processing enterprises, fill in gaps in the value chain that make other investments less likely to succeed, and create ways to ensure that poor farmers are able to benefit.44 Related to this, the donors could put a greater emphasis on using market incentives in combination with programs to abate risk and open new market opportunities.
The investment practices of the development finance institutions (DFIs) and international finance institutions (IFIs), including the International Finance Corporation (IFC), will be especially critical to stimulating the type and amount of activity required for the implementation of CAADP. Notably, however, their role is undermined by the significant pressure they face from their governments and investors to be profitable, which tends to create a strong preference for downstream investments (such as processing) and firms with proven track records. While investment in processing and ongoing enterprises remains important, the increased disincentive for investment in production agriculture that results from these practices undermines opportunities for broad-‐based agricultural development. Both production agriculture and start-‐ups carry a higher risk burden, which is not offset in production agriculture (especially at a more modest commercial scale) by high returns. As a result, start-‐ups and production agriculture in general are less attractive to most commercial investors as well. But both are essential to creating value chains and to supporting the kind of dense clusters of enterprises Africa so desperately needs. Furthermore, rather than work to reduce risk at the firm level and provide models for success, many investors use public monies to de-‐risk at the portfolio level, keeping their low-‐return investments to a minimum and balancing them (and covering their losses) with more profitable ventures in other sectors. This perpetuates rather than lowers market risk, which is seen as an immutable factor more suitable for high table policy discussions than for the investor.
The Role of Donor Trade and Investment Policies
The policy environment is also directly linked to the ability of donor interventions to encourage greater private sector investment. Most immediately, and as discussed above, weak enabling environments—which tend to persist even if policies are improved “on paper”—result in increased costs of doing business that render many investments uneconomic and might prevent them from taking place at
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all.45 Private sector investors will not wait for the long and often unsuccessful government-‐driven processes to improve business conditions.46 Particularly if coupled with opportunity-‐driven policy change, bilateral and multilateral donors can shape programs to directly address and reduce market risk by allocating funds to address legal and regulatory challenges that may stand in the way of otherwise viable investments.
In addition, donor country policies themselves play a role in facilitating
greater private sector investment in African agriculture. As discussed above, market failures caused by weak enabling environments and fragmented regional markets contribute to significant risk for investors.47 While these risks are not primarily caused by donor country policies, donor policies can further fragment African markets through complex, inconsistent and overlapping policies. In some cases, these complexities arise from very different donor approaches—as is the case with the United States and European countries;48 in other cases they can result from conflicting approaches within donor governments.49 Often, because opportunity-‐driven analysis is lacking, donor policy approaches can significantly limit African opportunities and further complicate fragmented markets, such as has been the case with Europe’s Economic Partnership Agreements. 50 These effects, however unintentional, can be avoided through the opportunity-‐driven policy model discussed above, which will ultimately lead to more opportunities for donor and African private sector participants alike.
Furthermore, the donors lack policies that are effective in helping Africans
develop strong markets. Donor trade policies have focused too exclusively on opening export markets, neglecting the more important regional market development. A new model for agricultural development that moves beyond traditional donor aid is also badly needed.51 In order to address Africa’s more systemic food security issues, the donor countries will need to bring much more than their aid agencies to the table.
Overall, a more effective policy approach on the part of the donors would
involve resetting priorities to unlock new investment potential and a new form of partnership with the private sector. It would also require breaking down silos and increasing coordination within governments, both within Africa and in donor countries. As discussed in the next section, CAADP implementation will ultimately rely upon mechanisms that can spur private sector investment, leverage effective donor interventions and generate necessary policy change.
(4) Strengthening Governance, Accountability and Implementation Structures
The recommendations above outline the elements of an approach that could be scaled up to move CAADP forward in the direction it has declared is an urgent priority. But mechanisms for bringing this approach together with concrete demand from the private sector will also be necessary. Fundamentally, this will require nimble new structures for coordination, governance and accountability.
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Addressing Challenges at the National and Regional Levels Without question, much more emphasis needs to be placed on building
capacity and empowering the CAADP country teams to incorporate and use information from the private sector to stimulate the policy changes that are most needed, coordinate public and private investment efforts to best leverage the strengths of both, and aggregate and scale up existing models for inclusive growth. Most engagement with the private sector—working with companies, cooperatives and farmers, and finding viable and inclusive investment opportunities—will need to take place within countries, especially work to give subsistence farmers the confidence to move into deeper relationships with the private sector and use new production technologies that offer real benefits but also carry greater risk. CAADP implementation will require strong country level teams with resources to carry out this work. Significant investment will be needed to build the capacity—in terms of skills, personnel and strategies—for the country teams to be able to perform the next stage of work.
However, at the national level, those in charge of the CAADP country processes have had to navigate within a challenging political climate, and their authority has depended upon the interest of the donors, NEPAD, the AU and increased general concern over global and national food security. When CAADP was first created ten years ago, it appeared to many country governments to be either irrelevant or even a possible threat to national sovereignty. Governments had become used to donors giving agricultural development a low priority, as was the case for the previous 30 years. Control over access to the budget process—including the “development budget”—was negotiated among country finance ministers and their donor partners, and the relationships were jealously guarded.
After a decade, and much to the credit of the country teams and CAADP leadership, political attitudes toward CAADP (and toward agricultural development in general) have improved greatly. However, especially in countries that still do not prioritize agricultural development, opportunities for political engagement between CAADP country-‐level leaders and the more powerful ministries with control over budget and policy disputes remains limited. Country-‐level CAADP officials are often unable even to present a “voice of reason” at the table and challenge short-‐term politically motivated decisions affecting the agriculture sector. This lack of authority and clout makes CAADP less interesting to investors, and several of the CAADP reviewers suggested that at the country level CAADP should become a “service provider” for businesses seeking to invest in agriculture in that country. Without new resources and a strengthened mandate, however, the already overstretched CAADP country leaders will not be in a position to provide such services or carry out implementation activities.
In addition to the national-‐level focus, CAADP’s leadership, NEPAD and the
AU have all repeatedly articulated support for regional market development.52 These efforts have focused on two channels—regional planning processes
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(compacts) and support for the regional Development Corridors—both of which are meant to be carried out through the RECs. The regional compact planning process is relatively new to CAADP, and only the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) region has produced a plan. While several other regional plans are underway, including one with the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) and a newer process with the East African Community (EAC),53 this process is still quite new and must find ways to effectively connect to the national level where much of the action will be required.
The RECs have an important role to play in regionalization but they
themselves have struggled with becoming an agent of change because of capacity challenges, operational constraints and complicated political legacies. For these reasons, many CAADP observers question the extent to which the RECs can drive CAADP implementation. The 2010 CAADP review described the problem well:
Although the RECs vary with respect to their capacities, resources and the extent to which they are trusted by their member states, the scale of the task of launching and supporting CAADP implementation simultaneously in many countries is far beyond even the strongest of them. Efforts to strengthen the RECs are being undertaken in parallel with the implementation process but this has not alleviated the immediate capacity constraint.54
Effective implementation of CAADP will require mechanisms that can
navigate these challenges at the national and regional levels and drive the CAADP process forward. Working through such mechanisms would require a CAADP structure that has greater executive capacity and can work at both national and regional levels to bring all of the existing pieces together and generate dynamic new forward momentum. This strengthened institutional structure should be built on the foundation that has already been laid, enhancing rather than replacing the hard work of ten years of CAADP deliberations and processes. One promising possibility, which already has strong support within CAADP, exists in the regional Development Corridors. Building on the Development Corridors as a Coordinating Mechanism
The Development Corridors (see Box 4) represent a market-‐driven approach to regional development.55 As such, they offer a mechanism to support CAADP implementation and activities in a way that draws in and coordinates with the private sector.
Box 4 The African Development Corridors
The Development Corridors stemmed from Nelson Mandela’s vision for economic growth and security in sub-‐Saharan Africa, which hinged upon economic policies shared across regions, greater collaboration between business and government, and more transportation linkages between Africa’s vast interior and international maritime trading routes. As
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President of South Africa, Mandela recognized what is widely accepted today: Africa’s rudimentary transportation infrastructure is preventing African entrepreneurs from benefitting—as either sellers or buyers—from regional and global markets, ultimately keeping millions of Africans locked in poverty.56 Mandela was especially concerned that Africa’s hundreds of millions of small—mostly subsistence—farmers be included in value chains and benefit from regional development strategies. Mandela also understood that most agricultural enterprises were not profitable enough to build infrastructure or command the changes required in the enabling environment, but he saw that if both demand and the infrastructure to link products and people with larger markets existed, a tremendous opportunity would be created for agriculture and food production. It would then be up to the country governments to build the “farm to market” roads that could over time give more remote African villages a way to move products in and out.57
While the Corridors present a more market-‐focused approach upon which to build, they too have had their challenges. Most of them do not as yet have adequate governance entities that could take on direct coordination with CAADP leadership, and, as noted in the CAADP Report, agricultural development suffers as a result. The most successful Corridor governing authorities have been those that have real power to regulate and to balance authority between the public and private sectors. (The Walvis Bay Corridor is one such example). Without this public-‐private balance, transport can be improved and donors somewhat better aligned, as happened with the Maputo Corridor, but the potential for stimulating private investment, especially in agriculture, will fall short.
In addition, both politics and private sector hesitation around agricultural
investment, due to some of the factors discussed above, have often limited the possibilities for realizing the vision for the Corridors. While the Corridors need business to thrive—as was demonstrated by experience with the successful Corridors in Southern Africa—business has mainly been interested in using the Corridors for resource extraction and other industrial development. 58 Furthermore, within Africa, continent-‐wide support has been needed for the Corridors, yet NEPAD, the RECs and the AU have taken a somewhat piecemeal approach to the Corridors and regional integration more broadly, limiting opportunities for market development.
The new focus on food security in Africa and new business interest in agriculture hold particular hope for a heightened and coordinated role for the Corridors as well as particular implications for CAADP. A number of countries, donor development agencies and other stakeholders (including the World Economic Forum) have embraced Mandela’s vision, at least in part, and support the Corridors as a touch-‐down point for investment opportunities. If enhanced, the Corridors could offer an institutional approach that is complementary to CAADP’s framework and could help CAADP move forward into implementation without the need for creating an entirely new implementation structure. The Corridors could potentially host a continent-‐wide structure through which, for example, the global companies that have pledged support for Grow Africa and the New Alliance for Global Food Security and Nutrition, both of which link to CAADP, could work with the national
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private sectors (farmers, SMEs, Africa-‐based agribusiness) and other innovative mid-‐sized businesses and investors, all in tandem with donors. Scaling Up
In order for a mechanism like the Corridors to succeed and become a critical part of CAADP’s implementation, public resources available to the donors for African food security will have to be used at least in part to create more efficient ways to expand and replicate successful enterprises and models (rather than create individual success stories and move on), leverage private capital through more efficient interventions and partnerships, and use the combination of public and private investment in an “action-‐forcing” way to create better business conditions.
For example, donor efforts could work in combination with a private sector investment facility for agriculture on each Corridor that provides a market-‐based focus for commercial investment, is capitalized by global investors, businesses and banks, and offers competitively priced capital, business acumen and globally accepted standards and procedures. This structure could strengthen CAADP country-‐level implementation capacity, help with risk mitigation, and provide better access to public goods and public capital aimed at leveraging more private sector investment. There is a rich and detailed literature on how such a facility might work, but it would be important that its investment decisions be governed by commercial agricultural investment and business rules, within the framework of globally accepted financial standards and procedures. Donor funds could be used to leverage the private sector investments, work to expand opportunity, pursue strategies to reduce risk and use public donor capital to expand the number of people who would benefit. Through the introduction of global lending standards and world-‐class investment capacities, this could stimulate the proliferation of inclusive yet efficient models of agricultural development and encourage African financial systems to become more competitive and supportive of regional integration.
Such a facility could also be supported by technically proficient teams
capable of sourcing, assessing, putting together, and supporting new and existing business ventures. The donors could support CAADP country teams and work with them to ensure the integrity of the procedures and practices, as well as facilitate the realization of CAADP’s dual goals of food security and agricultural growth. A CAADP implementation team with more capacity to work within the framework of the compact agreements at the national level and, with donor and investment support, at the regional level through the Corridors could provide a powerful incentive for bureaucratic change, more government cooperation, better harmonization of practices, and support for other necessary functions. This would provide a means of moving forward continent-‐wide in a timely, efficient and equitable manner.
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Strengthening Regional Value Chains
As the regional compact planning process picks up steam in both COMESA and the EAC, approaches that complement the Corridors are emerging to engage the private sector, implement regional market development and build much-‐needed institutional capacity. One promising approach is public-‐private collaboration around regional value chain hubs that coordinate the factors and stakeholders necessary for development along value chains to occur.
As with the Corridors and ongoing value chain development through Grow Africa and other initiatives, success will depend upon focused public-‐private collaboration and the ability to effectively scale up models to develop storage, feeder roads and other necessary infrastructure and enhance technical capacity and capability within regional institutions and farmers’ organizations alike. The hubs and other value chain initiatives will also have to successfully deliver ways in which to open up regional trade in practice instead of on paper, including through one-‐stop border posts and other trade facilitating measures.
Closing the Capacity and Policy Gaps
Over time, in addition to providing a practical way to use public funds to leverage private sector investment in support of both agricultural growth and poverty reduction through wealth enhancement, the Corridors and related mechanisms could also provide a training ground for young Africans and developed country professionals in investment, law and policy and the full range of services needed to make entrepreneurial enterprises fully successful. This would build on but go beyond the technical assistance currently offered by donors and nonprofits and could target services directly to the needs of entrepreneurs. However, it will be important to ensure that the public goods approach is promoted so that benefits can be extended beyond one investment or firm to the sector as a whole in a way that recognizes the many equities involved. Such activities would contribute to more steady investment in support of building African capacity and would leave behind functioning institutions at the end of the process.
Going full circle, the business opportunities made through these efforts could also be action-‐forcing events to demonstrate that a better business climate creates more opportunity for more people, which in turn will lead to more prosperity and stability. Trade and investment policies will remain critical. One of the lessons of the failure of the Doha Development Round of global trade talks at the World Trade Organization (WTO) is that without a viable development plan that links more liberal trade policies with reliable opportunities for economic growth and food security, trade liberalization will not garner the support required to override the entrenched interests that have always blocked reform.
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Conclusion
The possibility of implementing CAADP in a dynamic, inclusive way is very tangible, yet visionary new efforts will be required to bring all of the drivers for change together and enable CAADP to better deliver on its promise. If appropriately scaled up and combined with significant technical competence and support, the approaches and mechanisms discussed above could provide a real-‐time way for businesses of all sizes to engage in Africa’s agricultural development, potentially speeding up successful implementation and strengthening the CAADP institutions, RECs and the Corridors.
Effectively building up these mechanisms and moving to an opportunity-‐driven strategy to remove barriers and better aligning donor practices would require a seismic shift among the Africans and donors alike. But the need for such a solution stems from a close reading of the CAADP literature and the urgent situation facing African agriculture: only by building on the strengths of the public and private sectors and linking CAADP to existing institutional processes will it be possible to take advantage of the current window of opportunity for Africa’s farmers and consumers to put the continent’s tremendous agricultural production potential to use to feed its people and spur economic growth. Support structures that facilitate quicker action among the players at the country and regional levels must be put in place, however, as this window of opportunity is closing fast.
Climate change is taking an increasing and unexpectedly rapid toll, threatening to cut rain-‐fed farm yields by half, with severe impacts for the vast preponderance of African farming. Without major private sector investment to increase productivity, build regional markets, and create jobs and wealth among Africa’s rural people, the deterioration of Africa’s productive capacity and the resulting diaspora of hungry and ill-‐equipped Africans would not only wreak havoc in rural areas but would also be felt acutely in the cities, the region, and worldwide. The ambitious plans of donors to use their resources to facilitate sustainable food security and economic growth in Africa would thus be deflected once again—as they must—to meet increasingly dire new emergencies that require emergency aid responses but do nothing to build the long term capacity of Africa to feed itself. 1 “CAADP-‐Sustaining the Momentum Into the Next Decade,” NEPAD and NEPAD Planning and 2 Global Harvest Initiative, Global Agricultural Productivity (GAP) Report, 2011-‐12 Washington, DC. 3 Alassane Ouattera, “Stability and Prosperity in West Africa: Cote d’Ivoire’s Contribution,” Chattam House, July 27, 2012. 4 Value chain development implies mutual investment up and down the production chain, with “value” added to each leg of the chain. Agriculture, in particular, lends itself to a value chain approach, with
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food safety, quality and traceability included in the system. 5 Supra, Note 1. 6 Id. 7 “Overview: Pathways, Drivers, and Spaces,” Johannes F. Linn, Brief I in “Scaling Up in Agriculture, Rural Development and Nutrition,” Johannes F. Linn, ed., Focus 29, June 2012, 2020 Vision for Food, Agriculture and the Environment, International Food Policy Research Institute. 8 Id. 9 The CAADP Report proposes “new energy for devising infrastructure corridors must incorporate agricultural opportunities and seek synergies.” Supra, Note 1. 10 A particularly comprehensive compilation of research by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) makes a compelling case for the central role of agribusiness in agricultural development, highlighting the “strong synergies . . . between agribusiness, agricultural performance and poverty reduction for Africa. “Agribusiness for Africa’s Prosperity,” Kandeh Yumkella, Patrick Kormawa, Torben Roepstorff, and Anthony Hawkins, eds., UNIDO, 2011. See also Imoni Akpofure, “Let the Private Sector be a Catalyst for Sustainable Development,” GREAT Insights, Vol. 1, Issue 8, October 2012 (European Centre for Development Policy Management) and “CAADP Review: Renewing the Commitment to African Agriculture,” Final Report, NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency, March 2010. 11 See Babatunde Omilola, Mbaye Yade, Joseph Karugia and Pius Chilonda, “Monitoring and Assessing Targets of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) and the First Millennium Development Goal (MDG) in Africa,” ReSAKSS Working Paper No. 31, July 2010.
12 “CAADP Review: Renewing the Commitment to African Agriculture,” Final Report, NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency, March 2010. 13 Ghana is touted as a success story for its engagement with other stakeholders, including the private sector, while Ethiopia is noted as having a less robust private sector engagement process. See “CAADP Success Stories 2 Ghana: Enhancing Stakeholder Engagement,” NEPAD March 2011 and “CAADP: Highlighting the Successes,” NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency, November 2010. 14 Grow Africa is focused on Rwanda, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Tanzania, Mozambique, Ghana and Kenya. See “African and Global Leaders Rally Private Sector Investment to Accelerate Agricultural Transformation,” AllAfrica.com, May 10, 2012, available at http://allafrica.com/stories/201205101271.html?page=2. 15 See, e.g., Presentation by FANARPAN available at www.fanrpan.org/documents/.../NSA_presentation-‐Yaounde.pps. 16 Keith Palmer, “Achieving Higher Growth and Poverty Reduction in Sub-‐Saharan Africa: A Note for the Commission on Africa,” 2004. 17 For example, political borders “separate surplus millet and sorghum producers in southern Mali and Burkina Faso from deficit markets in half a dozen surrounding countries; surplus maize and bean producing zones of Uganda from deficit markets in Kenya, southern Sudan and Rwanda; food surplus northern Mozambique and southern Tanzania from intermittently deficit markets in Malawi and eastern Zambia; and livestock exporters in Mali, Mauritania, and Niger from coastal markets all
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across West Africa.” Steven Haggblade, “Unscrambling Africa: Regional Requirements for Achieving Food Security,” Michigan State University, October 2010. 18 In some countries, up to 90 percent of rural livelihoods are focused around agriculture. World Bank, World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development, Washington, DC 2008. 19 See Francesco Rampa, “Trade and Development for Food Security: Tapping the Potential of Regional Agricultural Trade,” in GREAT Insights, Vol. 1, Issue 1, January/February 2012 (European Centre for Development Policy Management). Report cites UNCTAD, “Economic Development in Africa Report 2009: Strengthening Regional Economic Integration for Africa’s Development,” 2009. 20 See, Francesco Rampa, “Trade and Development for Food Security: Tapping the Potential of Regional Agricultural Trade,” in GREAT Insights, Vol. 1, Issue 1, January/February 2012 (European Centre for Development Policy Management). 21 Foreword by Marcelo Giugale in Paul Brenton and Gozde Isik, eds., “Defragmenting Africa: Deepening Regional Trade Integration in Goods and Services,” World Bank 2012. 22 “Trade Facilitation to Promote Intra-‐African Trade,” Committee on Regional Cooperation and Integration, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, March 24-‐25, 2005. 23 Foreword by Marcelo Giugale Paul Brenton and Gozde Isik, eds., “Defragmenting Africa: Deepening Regional Trade Integration in Goods and Services,” World Bank 2012. 24 For the 2009 World Development Report, World Bank economists analyzed the past 20 years of the agency’s infrastructure investments, dividing the developing world into four regions, one of which was sub-‐Saharan Africa. They found that, in three of those regions, over 75 percent of the business infrastructure was in the “right” places to underpin increased economic growth. In Sub-‐Saharan Africa, the figure was under 50 percent. World Bank, World Development Report 2009: Reshaping Economic Geography, Washington, DC, 2009. 25 Vivien Foster & Cecilia Briceño-‐Garmendia, PowerPoint presentation based on Africa’s Infrastructure: A Time For Transformation, World Bank, 2009. Presented March 2010. 26 LM Harmon, B Simataa and A van der Merwe “Implementing Facilitation on Trade and Transport Corridors,” Proceedings of the 28th Southern African Transport Conference (SATC 2009), Document Transformation Technologies, Pretoria, South Africa, July 6-‐9, 2009. 27 Todd Moss and Alicia Bannon, “Africa and the Battle over Agricultural Protectionism,” Washington, DC: Center for Global Development, 2009. 28 While the costs of transport delays are significant, the benefits of reducing transport times can be immediate and transformative. Mali and Senegal signed a border cooperation agreement that reduced the number of checkpoints from twenty-‐five to four, and transport time quickly went from seven to ten days to just one or two. “Doing Business in Landlocked Economies,” Washington, DC: World Bank Group, 2009. 29 Id. 30 Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion, Oxford University Press 2007. See also “Assessing Regional Integration in Africa IV: Enhancing Intra-‐African Trade,” Economic Commission for Africa, African Union, African Development Bank, 2010. 31 See Iwa Salimi, “African Economic Integration and Legal Challenges,” in GREAT Insights, Vol. 1, Issue 1, January/February 2012 (European Centre for Development Policy Management).
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32 See Jakob Oster and Paida Nyamakanga, “Engaging Local Business Organizations as a Powerful Tool for Successful Public-‐Private Dialogue,” in GREAT Insights, Vol. 1, Issue 8, October 2012 (European Centre for Development Policy Management). 33 See Advisory Council on Trade, “A Market-‐Based Approach to Trade and Development: Policy Recommendations for the Prospective U.S.-‐EAC Trade and Investment Partnership,” September 2012, available at http://transfarm.org/act/. 34 Foreword by Marcelo Giugale in “Defragmenting Africa: Deepening Regional Trade Integration in Goods and Services,” Paul Brenton and Gozde Isik, eds., World Bank 2012. 35 Francesco Rampa, “Trade and Development for Food Security: Tapping the Potential of Regional Agricultural Trade,” in GREAT Insights, Vol. 1, Issue 1, January/February 2012 (European Centre for Development Policy Management). 36 “Agribusiness for Africa’s Prosperity,” Kandeh Yumkella, Patrick Kormawa, Torben Roepstorff, and Anthony Hawkins, eds., UNIDO, 2011. 37 Keith Palmer, “Achieving Higher Growth and Poverty Reduction in Sub-‐Saharan Africa: A Note for the Commission on Africa,” 2004. 38 “Tanzania: Key Stakeholders Want More Incentives for the Agricultural Sector,” Tanzania Daily News, December 26, 2011. 39 See Philippe Scholtes, “Tapping into the Agribusiness Potential for Africa’s Prosperity,” October 24, 2012, International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD). 40 Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) “Improving Livelihoods, Removing Barriers: Investing for Impact in Mtanga Farms,” November 2011.
41 Under What Conditions are Value Chains Effective Tools for Pro-‐Poor Development? Report from the Sustainable Food Lab to the Ford Foundation, http://pubs.iied.org/pdfs/16029IIED.pdf 42 Observatory of Economic Complexity (http://atlas.media.mit.edu/). Given the importance of the policy environment in unlocking untapped economic opportunity, TransFarm Africa is partnering with the Observatory to add a new dimension that maps the policy environment affecting products with nascent economic potential.
43 Supra, Note 1. 44 Under What Conditions are Value Chains Effective Tools for Pro-‐Poor Development? Report from the Sustainable Food Lab to the Ford Foundation, http://pubs.iied.org/pdfs/16029IIED.pdf 45 Keith Palmer, “Achieving Higher Growth and Poverty Reduction in Sub-‐Saharan Africa: A Note for the Commission on Africa,” 2004. 46 “Spotlight on African Agriculture,” INFOCUS, September 2012, Lion’s Head Global Partners, available at http://www.lhgp.com/120924-‐Spotlight%20on%20Ag_final%20Sep12.pdf.
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47 Keith Palmer, “Achieving Higher Growth and Poverty Reduction in Sub-‐Saharan Africa: A Note for the Commission on Africa,” 2004. 48 See Dominique Njinkeu, “Boosting Intra-‐African Trade: What Role for the External Trade Regime,” in GREAT Insights, Vol. 1, Issue 1, January/February 2012 (European Centre for Development Policy Management). 49 For example, the U.S. government has been a strong proponent of global food security efforts, including through the Grow Africa initiative and New Alliance on Food Security and Nutrition that highlight opportunities in sectors like sugar in which the United States still maintains heavily restrictive agricultural and trade policies that distort the global market. 50 See Antoine Bouët, David Laborde and Simon Mervel, “Searching for an Alternative to Economic Partnership Agreements,” Washington, DC: IFPRI Brief [48], December 2007 and Patrick Messerlin “Economic Partnership Agreements: How to Rebound?” in Updating Economic Partnership Agreements to Today’s Global Challenges, The German Marshall Fund, Economic Policy Paper Series, November 2009. 51 See Dolly Afun-‐Ogidan, “Regional Integration for Food Security in East Africa: The Role of CAADP,” GREAT Insights, Vol. 1, Issue 4, June 2012 (ECDPM). See also Philippe Scholtes, “Tapping into the Agribusiness Potential for Africa’s Prosperity,” October 24, 2012, International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD). 52 See, e.g., “CAADP: Highlighting the Successes,” NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency, November 2010. 53 Dolly Afun-‐Ogidan, “Regional Integration for Food Security in East Africa: The Role of CAADP,” GREAT Insights, Vol. 1, Issue 4, June 2012 (ECDPM). 54 “CAADP Review: Renewing the Commitment to African Agriculture,” Final Report, NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency, March 2010. 55 For a comprehensive analysis of the Development Corridors, see Katrin Kuhlmann, Susan Sechler and Joe Guinan “Africa’s Development Corridors as Pathways to Agricultural Development, Regional Economic Integration and Food Security in Africa,” Draft Working Paper, Aspen Institute June 15, 2011. 56 “Development Corridors” sound like an abstract concept, but, in fact, they have been central to all development: the roads of the Roman Empire, the canals and railroads of England, the rail, river and Interstate Highway System of the United States.
57 See Dave Perkins and Glen Robbins “The Contribution to Local Enterprise Development of Infrastructure for Commodity Extraction Projects: Tanzania’s Central Corridor and Mozambique’s Zambezi Valley,” Making the Most of Commodities Programme (MMCP) Discussion Paper No. 9 March 2011.
58 See Monty Roodt “The Impact of Regional Integration Initiatives and Investment in a Southern African Cross-‐Border Region: The Maputo Development Corridor,” African Sociological Review 12, 1, 2008.