1969 was the defining year. The United States of America (USA) finally achieved the national goal set by President John. F Kennedy in 1961. The mission was to perform a crewed lunar landing and return to earth. The US’ attempt to achieve the Apollo 11 mission galvanised the entire country on a mission. While the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was the primary agency for the mission, there was alignment across a wide range of industries – aviation and aircraft manufacturing, technology, automobile manufacturing, technology & telecommunications, consumer electronics, fashion and garments – to achieve the mission. All of these industry verticals aligned to deliver the US’ mission to the moon and back. This is the power of missions. They are inherently able to ignite the energies of different sectors and interests towards a national priority.
Photo source: Chor Sokunthea / World Bank
The challenge of food security
African countries are dealing with the existential threat of food insecurity. The numbers have always been stark. Post-COVID and the crisis in Ukraine, they are now dizzying. 278 million people in Africa suffer chronic hunger, an unacceptable 20% of the continent’s population. This is double the global average of 10%. The continent is not on course to achieve its objective of zero-hunger by 2030. The continent’s food import bill could move from the current $43 billion to a whopping $110 billion by 2030.
Given the current high levels of currency depreciation across the continent, affordability of essential food items will be more of a struggle, as a one percentage point increase in the rate of currency depreciation leads to a 0.22 percentage point increase in inflation within the first year in that region. If we add the challenge of climate change, this situation even gets more difficult. Yield models run by McKinsey show that by 2030, Ethiopia’s wheat farmers will face 11% greater likelihood than today of a 10% or greater drop in annual yield. For coffee farmers, the chance of experiencing a 25% or greater drop in annual yield could climb from 3.2% to 4.2% in 2030, a 31% increase and a 28% cumulative likelihood over the next decade, cutting the country’s GDP growth rate by about 3 percentage points. With agriculture contributing one-fifth of sub-Saharan Africa GDP, these look like scary times.
Nigeria’s approach to food security has seen the agriculture sector develop and implement policies like the Agriculture Transformation Agenda (ATA) in 2012, the Agriculture Promotion Policy (APP) in 2016 and the National Agricultural Technology and Innovation Policy (NATIP) of 2022. These policies have had varying levels of success, but they certainly have not provided the much desired food security. Actually, quite far from it. According to 2022 data from the World Food Programme (WFP) on 26 states in Nigeria, the share of people in stressed food security situations with minimally adequate food consumption is 34% of the population and acute food insecure population rose by 5.4 million people to 17 million in the year preceding that (about 9% of the population).
Industrial policies vs national missions
Whilst industrial policies seek to promote the productivity of firms that operate in a particular sector / vertical, national missions seek to promote the achievement of national priorities. The idea of missions was popularised by the Italian-American-British Economist, Mariana Mazzucato. In her seminal works, The Entrepreneurial State (2011) and the Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism (2021), she asserted that the role of public policy needs to move from a traditional approach of trying to correct sector-specific market failures to helping countries achieve national priorities that shape the future of industries.
National missions provide the direction for innovation policies within various sectors. So if we look at the challenge of food security in Nigeria, there are a range of sectors; agriculture, education, science and technology, trade and finance, transportation infrastructure, environment, and so on, which can align their innovation efforts specifically at solving the food security challenge. So rather than have these various industrial sectors create policies focused on correcting previous sector-specific market failures (which is a reactive approach to policy making), the country can achieve ‘economies of effort’ if all these policies are focused on achieving national priorities (which is a proactive approach to a desirable future for the country). The mission-oriented approach to policy development also helps coalesce the unique strengths of the private, public and third sectors in achieving these national priorities as all stakeholders are held accountable to mission metrics that are transparent.
There is evidence to show that missions are an opportunity to achieve national food security objectives. At the start of the industrial revolution in the United States, the country had a mission to improve productivity of the agricultural sector. A key driver of that was the use of improved seedlings for agriculture production. The country deployed its key institutions; the United States Navy, the US Patent Office and the US Post Office to achieve this mission. The Navy imported the seeds that were needed from other countries (with some historical accounts noting that some of these were actually illegally imported during the Presidency of Thomas Jefferson), the US Patent Office held the repository rights for these seeds and the US Postal Service distributed these seeds to farmers through the mail system.
Based on this experience, the US Patent Office requested for a national agriculture research bureau. In response to this request the US Congress in 1839 created the Agricultural Department of the Patent Office, which evolved to the Department of Agriculture in 1862. The education sector was also not left out of this mission, as the Morrill Act of 1862 allotted 30,000 acres of Federal land to each state to establish colleges to teach agriculture, technical skills, military skills and classical studies. By 1919, more than three-quarters of wheat acreage in the country was planted with seed varieties that had been unavailable before the passage of the Morrill Act.
Food systems transformation is the pathway but not the mission
The food systems transformation approach provides a useful roadmap to achieving agriculture missions. However, food systems transformation is not the mission; it certainly does not sound like a compelling national priority, simply because it isn’t. However, it must be noted that the food systems transformation approach, for which Nigeria has made some admirable progress, offers a useful pathway for the alignment of the various activities towards the mission. Actually, missions provide the context of outcomes for food systems transformation.
Bringing it home: achieving national missions
Only recently, the Nigerian government inaugurated Ministers to deliver the government’s plans and programmes. Food security has been identified as one of the objectives of the administration. The government actually declared a state of emergency on food security, transferring it to the purview of the National Security Council (NSC).
Presidential spokesman, Dele Alake, noted, “There must be an urgent synergy between the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Water Resources to ensure adequate irrigation of farmlands and to guarantee that food is produced all-year round. We shall create and support a National Commodity Board that will review and continuously assess food prices as well as maintain a strategic food reserve that will be used as a price stabilisation mechanism for critical grains and other food items. Through this board, government will moderate spikes and dips in food prices.”
Good as this is, it is only a short-term fix, as the solution to the challenge of spikes and dips in food security goes way beyond the scope of a commodity board. This looks like a traditional approach to public policy, where the goal is to correct market failures and not to shape the evolution of the market. How do shape the future of the food ecosystem, to achieve the goal of food security?
I will suggest the operationalisation of an Office of National Priorities (ONP) in the Presidency. The ONP will then have the responsibility of identifying, through a top-down and bottom-up approach, specific priorities / missions that are clearly defined and achievable. While some of these functions are currently performed by the Ministry of Budget and National Planning, having these national priority functions performed by an Office in the Presidency should provide more flexibility and speed, given the nature of Ministry bureaucracies.
Having clearly identified these priorities, we can then have Ministries design policies, plans and programmes that are aligned to achieve these missions/priorities. So the NATIP for example, is one of the policies, in addition to policies on education, technology, transport and infrastructure, finance, environment, to mention a few. When these other sectors are subsumed under the agriculture policy, there is the risk of implementation inefficiencies, as the objective will be seen as an agriculture sector priority, not a national priority.
In assessing the successes or otherwise of policies, the frame of reference will not be sector or ministry specific milestones as standalones, but how far these policies move the country in the direction of the achievement of identified priorities. This approach provides significant coordination momentum for the government in delivering development outcomes.
A defining decade for Nigeria
This is a defining decade for the Nigerian state. How the country is able to develop policies, plans and programmes to deal with development challenges like food security, out-of-school children, unemployment/underemployment especially for the youth, currency devaluation, maternal and infant mortality, to mention a few in the next decade or so, will go a long way in determining the first half of the country’s 21st century. These challenges are wicked problems that cannot be easily solved. However, by approaching them as national priorities that can mobilise ‘economies of effort’ across the structure of the public, private and third sectors, I am positive that the country can make a significant dent in creating solutions to these problems.
Obinna Igwebuike, a management and development consultant, writes in from Lagos, Nigeria.