[BLOG] “The Accidental Ecowas & AU Citizen”: From the Continental to the Regional, there is Hope of Africa’s Agricultural Integration! (All Hail ECOWAS new Food & Agricultural Agency!)(1)
Back in 2012, I wrote a piece entitled “The AU as a Project in 'Human Endeavour and Continental Cooperation”. The major objective of the piece was to communicate to the wider public the importance of the AU and its CAADP programme.
Another year has passed, and so much has happened. Suffice-to-say, it is important to add that the piece was written in October 2012—the very month that Ghana adhered to a continental compact on agriculture back in October 2009. This is what I wrote: “It will be three years this October since Ghana joined the AU/NEPAD-sponsored Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP), and 2013 will be exactly a decade since CAADP – but one probably would not know it.” I bemoaned the fact that in the run-up towards Farmer’s Day in 2012, Ghana should have seized the opportunity to raise the issue of how far the country had gone in delivering on the CAADP, and even use Farmer’s Day as an opportunity to explain to the wider public the necessity of Ghana continuing to invest 10% of its budget in agriculture towards the realization of the CAADP programme.
An explanation of the Pan-African/continental compact included the fact that CAADP was endorsed in Maputo in 2003. According to CAADP's website, CAADP's overall-goal is to “eliminate hunger and reduce poverty through agriculture”. To achieve this, African governments have agreed to increase public investment in agriculture by a minimum of 10 per cent of their national budgets and “to raise agricultural productivity by at least 6 per cent.” This is to be done through CAADP's strategic functions, regional and economic communities, national roundtables and four key Pillars.
According to the AU’s Commissioner of Rural Economy and Agriculture of the AU Commission Rhoda Peace Tumusiime, interviewed in the August/September 2013 edition of “African Business”, so far no less than 30 African countries have signed the CAADP compacts, and “27 of these have strong and credible investment plans that are being used for public and private sector financing.” The Commissioner goes on to explain that countries like Rwanda, Ethiopia, Ghana, Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone have all managed to allocate additional finance to targeted programmes “that have the highest potential to generate return on these investments.” This is important as CAADP is also about agricultural productivity in a way that feeds into a development-oriented policy that will facilitate more food-secure African countries.
Questioned by the magazine on assurances that she, as the highest policy official, can give on CAADP changing the state of agriculture in Africa, she responds “it is important to- note how unique the CAADP is as an instrument to guide the continent’s efforts on agricultural development. Many people do not appreciate how important it is to have a functional and successful agricultural system in Africa.” She continues that “the value of CAADP is defined by challenges facing Africa’s agriculture. It has made efforts to translate the commitments made by heads of state in 2003 into what will actually help countries to strengthen their systems.”
Some of us would like to speculate that CAADP is a positive and concrete example of a Pan-African idea devolving to the national. That no less than 30 countries have already signed up is encouraging as it signals the importance that African policymakers clearly seem to have about agriculture. But there is a new development in this whole discourse, and it is about how a Pan-African idea/programme has devolved also to the regional.
Enter ECOWAS Food and Agricultural Agency…launched in September 2013
Even before I had read online that the ECOWAS Commission was planning on establishing a food and agricultural agency, I had read in the Follow-up recommendations from the Fourth Conference of African Ministers on Integration (COMAI) that ECOWAS was the regional economic community that had made considerable headway on its agricultural policy, and that in ECOWAS’ communication to the framers of the COMAI report, ECOWAS was going to establish the agency with immediate effect.
This is consistent with what the Netherlands-based think-tank ECDPM wrote in one of the articles about ECOWAS and agriculture. They maintain “ECOWAS is seen as a region that had made considerable progress in articulating a regional approach for agriculture within the CAADP framework” They continue that “As far back as 2001, ECOWAS initiated and adopted a framework of guidelines for the creation of a common regional agricultural policy for West Africa (ECOWAP). This conveniently coincided with the period when CAADP gained momentum and global interest.”
By 2005 the ECOWAP was adopted as the reference framework for CAADP implementation at the regional level in West Africa. The ECOWAS CAADP regional compact was launched in 2009, followed by the Regional Investment Plan (RAIP) in 2010. A Regional Agency for Agriculture and Food (RAAF), Regional Fund for Agriculture and Food (ECOWADF) and a Strategic and Operational Plan is currently being set up to implement the ECOWAP and its RAIP.
According to ECDPM, “The ECOWAS Commission was also quite proactive in supporting its member states along the CAADP process at the national level: it provided technical support and financial assistance of over USD 0.4mn to each member state to organize the national CAADP compact and investment plan formulation process”
We now know that only last week, ECOWAS launched its Food and Agricultural Agency (ARAA) in Lome, Togo, where it will be based. A search online for its French counterpart name of ARAA (Agence Regionale pour l’Agriculture et Alimentation) has, interestingly, yielded more search results than the Anglophone name. Even documents on the operationalisation of the agency and its composition are all still in French. For a flagship organisation whose translators are over-worked, it beggars belief that documents for the launch of a flagship agency like this can only be found in one language.
Why Togo was chosen to host FAA/ARAA
Notwithstanding any clear communication by ECOWAS on why Togo was chosen to host the regional food agency, I can only speculate that given the fact that Togo already hosts the ECOWAS Project Preparation and Development Unit—touted by ECOWAS as “an agency of the organization with the mandate to prepare bankable infrastructure projects to facilitate private and public sector investments”, as well as an agency [established in 2005] to identify “bottlenecks in the implementation of the NEPAD Short Term Action Plan adopted by the Heads of State and Government of the African Union in June 2002” – it made sense that it would be optimal to have an agency that is seeking to implement the continental CAADP at the regional level (through ECOWAS’s Common agricultural policy (ECOWAP) ) to be located very closely to the ECOWAS PPDU
Over the next couple of weeks and months, this column will touch more closely on the progress of CAADP (which 10 years of existence will be celebrated in 2014), and an exploration of what the new Food and Agricultural Agency will seek to do for the sub-region.
I personally hope that we can also begin to have a conversation in development circles in this country about why we should use Farmers’ Day in Ghana to begin to communicate the importance of agriculture and food security within the specific context of our development plans.
It is all-too-tempting to add that, veritably, from the continental to the regional, there truly might be hope for Africa’s agricultural integration!
In 2009, in his capacity as a “Do More Talk Less Ambassador” of the 42nd Generation—an NGO that promotes and discusses Pan-Africanism--Emmanuel gave a series of lectures on the role of ECOWAS and the AU in facilitating a Pan-African identity. Emmanuel owns "Critiquing Regionalism" (http://critiquing-regionalism.org). Established in 2004 as an initiative to respond to the dearth of knowledge on global regional integration initiatives worldwide, this non-profit blog features regional integration initiatives on MERCOSUR/EU/Africa/Asia and many others. You can reach him on ekbensah@ekbensah.net / Mobile: +233-268.687.653.
