Food sovereignty in West Africa — beyond the productionist trap

<p>The standard development economics framing of African agriculture is a productivity story: yields per hectare are below world averages, therefore the policy task is to raise yields. Hybrid seeds, fertilizer subsidies, mechanization. This framing has shaped donor-driven interventions for two generations. It has not delivered food security in West Africa. It has often delivered food *insecurity*, especially after currency shocks or rainfall failures, because productionist agriculture is also import-dependent agriculture.</p> <p>The food sovereignty framework — articulated by La Via Campesina and adapted to West African contexts by ROPPA (Réseau des Organisations Paysannes et de Producteurs de l&#x27;Afrique de l&#x27;Ouest) — flips the question. Food sovereignty asks: who controls the food system? Not just who grows what, but who decides what gets grown, who finances it, who buys the surplus, who sets the price floor.</p> <p>Consider Senegal. The Senegalese state has historically subsidized rice imports from Thailand and Vietnam because urban consumers — the politically loud constituency — wanted cheap rice for their evening *thieboudienne*. Domestic rice production, concentrated in the Senegal River valley, struggled against this subsidized competition. After the 2008 global food price spike, when Thai export bans threatened supply, the policy crisis was obvious. The response — the National Rice Self-Sufficiency Programme — invested in Senegal River valley irrigation, in millet and sorghum support, in cooperative storage. Self-sufficiency in rice was not achieved; what was achieved was a *reduction* in import dependency, from over 80% to about 60% in a decade.</p> <p>This is not a productionist victory; it&#x27;s a sovereignty victory. The shift required redirecting public money from import subsidies (which benefit foreign producers and domestic urban consumers) to producer-side investments (which benefit domestic producers, even at the cost of slightly higher consumer prices). Politically, that is a difficult trade. Senegal made it stick partly because the Mouride brotherhoods, who control much of the rural economy, lobbied effectively for the producer side.</p> <p>The lesson for the rest of the Sahel is institutional. Food sovereignty requires constituencies with sufficient political weight to defend producer-favoring policies through the next election cycle and the next exchange rate shock. Without those constituencies, the productionist drift back to cheap imports is gravitational.</p>