Policy support to African Agriculture: New trends or business as usual

African governments have widely acknowledged the important role that the agricultural sector plays to reduce poverty and improve food security. Nonetheless, governments’ stated policy objectives, the policy measures implemented to achieve these objectives and the effects they generate are often not in line. As a result, there are still many ambiguous and inadequately targeted trade and domestic agricultural policies in place aiming to protect certain interest groups, or directed to achieve certain policy goals that come at a cost for specific (non-targeted) groups within the country’s or region’s population. Based on an updated dataset covering the period 2005-2015 for fifteen African countries assembled in the context of the Monitoring and Analysing Food and Agricultural Policies (MAFAP) Project implemented by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations in collaboration with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), this paper proposes new estimates of the scale of distortions, and market inefficiencies and development challenges faced by the agriculture sector at different points of the commodities’ value chains in each country. Distortions to agricultural incentives are captured through the nominal rate of protection (NRP) and nominal rate of assistance (NRA) estimated across commodities for each year. The paper also proposes a first approach to systematically measure and compare market inefficiencies and development challenge in specific value chains through a newly developed indicator called the “Market Development Gap” which is also estimated for each commodity and for each year. Results are characterized by a huge heterogeneity across countries and commodities depending on the net trade position of the country and the status of the commodity. Overall, policy support increases with level of development which is only a confirmation of previous findings.