Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Security Policy

Hambulo Ngoma, Nicholas J Sitko, Thomas Jayne, Antony Chapoto, and Mywish Maredia. 2017. Institutional Architecture and Quality of Agriculture and Food Security Processes in Zambia. Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Security Policy Research Paper 75. East Lansing: Michigan State University.

ABSTRACT
Successive Zambian governments have committed to coordinated, all-inclusive developing planning to assure food and nutrition security and reduce poverty. Despite these efforts, questions remain around policy coherence and consistency in the agricultural sector and this—it is argued—is likely to crowd out private sector investment and engagement in the sector. This paper addresses several questions around the policy processes space in Zambia. What drives policy change? How does it happen? What accounts for the policy reversals or failure to fully adopt agreed upon policy changes? 

This paper reports on the perceived quality and design of agriculture and food security policy processes, and on the quality of the institutional architecture supporting these processes from a recent survey involving 23 agricultural stakeholders in Zambia. The overall results indicate that while there are positive aspects of the policy processes that are in place, there is scope for improvements. In particular, the agricultural and food security policy processes in Zambia could be more inclusive by engaging more with stakeholders and by more effectively utilizing the available empirical evidence to inform policy design.

There is also scope to strengthen the monitoring and evaluation systems of progress towards the agricultural development goals and make resources available to support policy implementation. The institutions supporting agricultural and food security policy processes need strengthening. In particular, the roles of the Agricultural Sector Working Group and the Parliamentary Committee of Agriculture can be strengthened to provide oversight in the sector. The paper also highlights the
main factors associated with the change from the traditional to the electronic voucher based implementation of the farmer input support program in Zambia.