Democracy and Development in Mali

Food Security Policy Reform in Mali and the Sahel

Food Security Policy Reform in Mali and the Sahel JOSUE DIONE Introduction The food crises of Mali and the other Sahelian countries during the 1970s and 1980s stemmed not only from the lingering effects of the severe droughts in the mid-1970s and early 1980s. Many observers of Sahelian development have concluded that poorly designed pricing and marketing policies distorted agricultural incentives and failed to address the major causes of the enduring food production gap throughout the subregion. In the late 1970s, many donors pressed for policy reforms to restore farmers' and private traders' investment incentives to increase food production and improve distribution. Under strong pressure from donors, the government of Mali agreed in March 1981 to carry out a series of policy reforms aimed at increasing official producer and consumer prices, liberalizing grain trade, and improving the efficiency of OPAM (Office des Produits Agricoles du Mali), the state grain board. This chapter analyzes the impact of the process of market liberalization on food security in Mali during the decade of the 1980s. Based on the central thesis that output market liberalization is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to improving food security in the Sahel, the chapter focuses on the interactive effects of technology, institutions, and policy reforms on food availability and access to food. 1 The chapter is divided into five sections. The first section highlights the food security problems in the Sahel in general. The second section presents an overview of food and agricultural policies in Mali from 1928 to 1989. The third section discusses the objectives, implementation and achievements ofthe cereal market liberalization process in Mali, and outlines some of the major issues for the 1990s. The fourth section draws some policy implications for food security in the Sahel. And the final section discusses food security in Mali after the 1991 revolution that led to the democratization of the country. 119 120 JOSUE DIONE Food Security Problems in the Sahel The attention of the entire world was captivated by news of hundreds of thousands of people dying from hunger and suffering from starvation during the prolonged drought of the mid-1970s and early 1980s in the Sahel. The international donor community responded generously, yet the food production gap continued to widen. Even though per capita cereals production was declining, the bulk of the aid was not directed at improving domestic productivity in the major food crops.2 Following the disappointing performance of crop-production and integrated rural development projects during the 1960s and 1970s, donors turned their attention to policy reforms in the general framework of structural adjustment lending programs. In this framework, pricing and marketing policies, which traditionally subsidized consumers by depressing producer prices and accumulating budget deficits of the state grain boards, were perceived as major impediments to food security. Instead, output price and market liberalization were identified as the means to restore farmers' and traders' incentives to invest and to increase the production and improve the distribution of the basic food staples, especially cereals. Food insecurity in Mali and throughout the Sahel, however, stems from a complex set of problems that cannot be solved by price and marketing reforms alone.3 The picture is much more complex, and it is possible to identify at least five fundamental causes of food insecurity in the Sahel. First, the overarching cause is poverty.4 With per capita GNPs ranging between US$160 and US$260, five Sahelian countries were among the sixteen poorest nations in the world in 1987. All Sahelian countries were among the world's forty-three poorest countries.s Between 1965 and 1986, the average annual growth rate of per capita GNP was positive but less than 1.5 percent in four of the nine countries and negative in the other five countries. Although the bulk of the population still lives in the rural area and is engaged in agriculture, over one-fourth of the Sahelians experience what Professor Sen calls a "pull failure" in their food entitlements, that is, inadequate access to food because of the low level of their real incomes.6 Failures in effective demand affect both the urban poor and food-deficit rural people (non-farmers as well as farmers), thus compounding constraints on the supply side of the Sahelian food-security equation. Second, most Sahelian countries lack appropriate agricultural technology that farmers can readily adopt to expand and stabilize the production of rainfed millet, sorghum, and maize, which account for about 80 percent of total cereals [18.223...