There are certainly agricultural production problems and economic policy distortions, but the agricultural crisis is largely outside of agriculture; it is upstream (fertilizers, seeds, techniques) and downstream (marketing, transport, storage, security of outlets, etc.). The integrated commodity chains are the ones that have been the most successful, even if producer prices have been adjusted downwards in times of economic downturn (see the success of the cotton sector presented above).
Stakeholder strategies, organization and regulation of networks
African agriculture is integrated into upstream and downstream relationships.
It is important to take into account the strategies of the different actors in the face of instabilities that generate risk and uncertainty, and their modes of organization in an institutional environment (Hugon, Pourcet, Quiers-Valette, 1994). On the one hand, markets are not very integrated and market relations are only one mode of coordination among others. On the other hand, the public circuits controlled by the States have failed. Urban supplies are provided through networks that combine domestic, market, public and industrial logics (Hugon in ALTER-SIAL/ CERED/ORSTOM, 1986). They are carried out within regulatory frameworks and institutional contexts. Public decision-makers at the communal and state levels have more or less important means to regulate these circuits.
Extensive agriculture is the result of rational choices. It minimizes risks and saves labor when land is abundant. However, in the event of demographic pressure, it leads to a shortening of fallow periods and a degradation of ecosystems.
Farmers operate in an unstable, risky or uncertain world. As soon as hazards are not probabilizable, the trade-off between risk (probabilizable) and profitability gives way to that between uncertainty (non-probabilizable) and security or liquidity. The priority for producers is food security, which is why self-consumption is often not digitized, leading to a residual surplus that is put on the market. The strategy is rather to diversify activities to reduce risks. In the absence of a stabilized environment, the choice favors technical processes that allow for reversibility. The priority of traders is different. The preference for liquidity, linked to the precariousness of situations (thirst for money) and the search for reversible processes, leads to great flexibility and short-termism on the part of operators (the fastest rate of return on advanced capital) (Hugon, 1993). Technical efficiency and the consideration of the long term are then ensured by network organizations that allow for the permanence of operations and reduce uncertainty. These networks can be organized on a family, religious or ethnic basis. They reduce transaction costs, allow for spatial, temporal and social proximity and function on the basis of trust and reliability. Industrialists and exporters are sensitive to the quality of products and to investments in the form of quality standards and reputations.
Agriculture is competing with imports. These are stimulated by importers and by bureaucrats who collect rents on these imports. The supply channels for imported food products allow low costs thanks to economies of scale for standardized products. But they only allow for accessibility if they are articulated with circuits that create divisibility with respect to clienteles with very low purchasing power, if they adapt to very unstable markets and therefore create flexibility. The industrial logic is articulated with more or less informal networks.
Thus, we see combinations of organizational modes that seek to reconcile the flexibility and reversibility necessary to manage instability with the permanence and irreversibility of the techniques necessary to achieve efficiency (Hugon, 1988).
The city has a stabilizing effect on farmers through the diversification of supplies, the variety of foodstuffs, less fluctuation in income than in rural areas, and a better circulation of information allowing operators to make trade-offs. It is also a place of innovation, organization of space and concentration of power. Nevertheless, the instabilities, which create uncertainty and risk, experienced by the agents ensuring urban supplies are very high. Informal urban incomes fluctuate greatly, food imports (e.g. rice) are very volatile, and urban insecurity is high.
Agriculture is thus inserted into organized circuits that can be analyzed in several ways:
- Functional, the sequence of the different phases of production, collection, transport, storage, transformation, distribution, preparation and consumption;
- Spatial, organization of flows in space around collection points, networks, short or long distance trade, nuclei, axes and bangs;
- Temporal: management of foreseeable, probabilizable, non-probabilizable hazards; storage and speculation operations;
- Relational, coordination of agents in contractual, associative, cooperative, binding, family forms, relationships of trust or loyalty;
- Technical, degrees of sophistication of equipment, reversibility of technical choices, importance of innovations (of products, of processes).
The agri-food sectors
The integration of agriculture seems to us to be enlightened by an analysis in terms of several circuits, networks or spatialized chains conceived as ideal types. We will distinguish four “commodity chains”. Their spatialization assumes that there is a relationship between the levels of organization, the techniques used, and the scales and spaces of reference (local, regional, national, international); we can thus differentiate between the space of the commodity chain, defined by the location of the various operations, and the geographical space (e.g., urban), the place where commodity chains or segments of commodity chains intersect.
The meso-system, or the interlacing of the various commodity chains, is an intermediary place for understanding, beyond the succession of upstream and downstream technical operations, the dynamics of the sub-systems within which fields of force are exercised, market and non-market relations are established, and modes of organization and strategies of actors whose objectives, and whose means, have levels of compatibility or incompatibility, are realized. The organizations of commodity chains are essential for understanding the efficiency of agricultural production, the establishment of contractual or dependency relationships allowing predictability or reducing transaction costs and leading to different degrees of flexible stabilization. Within commodity chains, there are strategic segments defined by the places of valorization, by the control of technologies, or by the control of accumulation possibilities (De Bandt, Hugon, 1988; Hugon in Benoit-Cattin, Griffon, Guillaumont, 1994).
The adaptation of agricultural production systems to different modes of food consumption is achieved through operations that take into account changes in material (transformation), space (transport), time (storage), and attribution (distribution). The modes of production, exchange and consumption are based on more or less capital-intensive techniques: they are carried out by units of varying dimensions and are organized according to different modes of coordination.
Transport from the farm to the urban market is generally carried out in at least four stages: from the field to the village (the first place of storage); from the village to the grouping and collection point; from the collection point to the silo; from the storage point to the urban market. Cities, especially those located on the maritime border, are often better connected to external circuits (Southeast Asia for rice, North America and Europe for cereals, Latin America or South Africa for meat, etc.) than to national production areas. This local disconnection is increasing as international transport costs decrease while national transport costs increase at the same rate as the energy bill. The decline in international transport costs and improvements in domestic land transport have largely changed supply routes and accelerated the urbanization process. Thus, the city of Kinshasa (3 million people) is certainly supplied by the major international transporters of wheat, rice and imported meat. It is also supplied by peri-urban agriculture and transport on foot or by cab. It is mainly supplied by small transporters from all over Bas Zaire and a large part of Bandundu, an area of 50,000 km2.
By shifting supply over time, storage plays a role in stabilizing seasonal prices or providing inter-annual food insurance; it can also be used to speculate on voluntarily created shortages. The question of a regulatory stock managed by (local) public, national or regional authorities or by private operators is central.
Marketing operations are more or less short and complex depending on the distance between producers and consumers: direct sales by peri-urban producers on urban markets, intermediary retailers between producers and consumers, wholesalers for long circuits, etc. In an effort to protect urban consumers and producers from the abuses of intermediaries, or to capture rural surpluses at the source, the authorities have often tried, with limited success, to control private marketing channels or to substitute them with public offices; today, under the influence of international donors, public monopolies are being dismantled to make way for private trade.
Over time, there has been an increasing transfer of the various operations that create added value from the rural to the urban world and a relatively low weight of agriculture in the total added value within the sectors.
We will distinguish four main commodity chains, circuits or networks according to their technology, their organization, their mode of regulation and their spatial dimension:
- Domestic (local) ;
- Artisanal and commercial (regional, infra or supranational);
- State-owned (national);
- Industrial and capitalist (international).
Source: Phillipe Hugon – Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa in its institutional environment