The opportunity cost of not repurposing public expenditure in food and agriculture in sub‑Saharan African countries – Background paper for The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2024.

Repurposing public support to food and agriculture has gained significant global attention. However, resources allocated to support the food and agriculture sector may not be high enough for significant repurposing in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper shows that most governments in 18 sub-Saharan African countries have allocated small shares of their budget to agriculture since 2004. Their narrow fiscal space and budget implementation capacity constrain any sizable increase in the budget allocated to agriculture. In this paper, an innovative policy optimization modelling tool helps us assess what would happen if the limited budget allocated to the crops and livestock sectors in six of the sub-Saharan African countries were reallocated optimally across different policy support measures and subsectors/commodities, under the same budget constraint. It shows public expenditure is being allocated inefficiently in all six countries and the needed reallocations to solve such allocative inefficiencies, which would result in higher agrifood output growth, thousands of off-farm jobs being created in rural areas, and millions of people getting out of poverty or being now able to afford a healthy diet.