Suggestions Are Better Than Nothing

The Heritage Foundation came out with a background article about the positive aspects of the Bush administration's Africa policy. The article 'Into Africa: Bush Initiatives That Deserve Continuing Support' tries to convince us of "President George W. Bush's determination to join compassion with resources." (I'll take issue with the article's titular parody of Isak Dinesen's 'Out of Africa' later.) The article reads like the Beatles' Let It Be Naked; it's a list of great songs (initiatives) that were re-released without any implication of the failures in production and execution that raked the origional.

Thomas M. Woods, the article's author, talks about policy initiatives in health, infrasturcture, government, etc. Aparently agriculture is the one developmental policy area that the most recent (current) U.S. administration has ignored. The Mr. Woods makes some broad policy suggestions for the next time around instead while seeming aloof as he talks about 'the poor'. The one thing I do agree with in the Heritage Foundation's assertions about the future of ag development policy comes when they say, "In the hierarchy of U.S.-Africa partnership goals, agricultural development should be a common thread running through many areas of cooperation." Mr. Woods fails to emphasize the importance of localizing agricultural development initiatives across Africa. The article is supposed to be a 'broad strokes' digestion of policy; I think localizing initiatives is a broad enough conceptual point about development that it should be included here.

The article's section on Agriculture is reproduced below:

Agriculture and Food Security. Millions of Afri­cans are chronically food insecure, a situation that spirals downward quickly when poor governance and natural disasters add to the crisis. In most Afri­can countries, about two-thirds of the people depend on agriculture for their sustenance and live­lihoods. Given that the poor live on less than a dollar a day, the World Bank estimates that GDP growth originating in agriculture is about four times more effective in raising incomes of extremely poor people than GDP growth in other sectors.[30]

African agriculture remains caught in a chronic cycle of poor economic governance, grain market­ing board monopolies, corrupt fertilizer importa­tion regimes, dilapidated rural infrastructure, nonexistent regional markets, and controversies over biotechnology. Interventions aimed at improv­ing Africa's agricultural output and its rural incomes must be systemic, comprehensive, and scaled up significantly to have any real impact. African governments need to recognize the impor­tant role of agriculture in moving a country out of the ranks of the least developed. Even though 75 percent of Africans live in rural communities, donors and African governments allocate only 4 percent of expenditures to developing the agricul­tural sector.[31]

In the hierarchy of U.S.-Africa partnership goals, agricultural development should be a common thread running through many areas of cooperation. Agriculture should be a higher priority in U.S. development efforts, whether MCC country com­pacts focused on agriculture, trade promotion under AGOA, market reform technical assistance, water utilization projects, rural road construction, or science and technology programs.

Additional U.S. support for the AU's Compre­hensive African Agricultural Development Program may prove a useful vehicle for this broad-based approach, provided that policy reform is given suf­ficient attention.[32] In addition, Doha Round talks need to reduce farm subsidies in both developed and developing countries, increase agricultural market access for all, and reduce tariff and non-tariff trade barriers.