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  • Publication | 2021

Politics, Power and Social Differentiation in African Agricultural Value Chains: the Effects of Covid-19 

Global Food and Nutrition Security

This paper draws upon the findings of the Agricultural Policy Research in Africa Programme (APRA), which began its research activities in 2016 to study the consequences of different pathways to agricultural commercialisation across value chains in six countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. In 2020 research teams in each of the countries conducted further research which considered the impacts of COVID-19 on these value chains, drawing upon political settlements frameworks to inform their analysis. This paper asks:

1. What can political settlements analyses tell us about agricultural value chains and responses to COVID-19 in the countries studied? and

2. How are structures and power relations throughout the value chains and actors’ responses to COVID-19 related to social differentiation in the context of African agriculture?

Smallholder agriculture provides most of the production in all the countries and value chains studied, although the extent to which farmers participate in markets or are supported to do so varies between contexts. Each of the study countries have developed policy strategies to support smallholder and larger-scale farmers at different times, which have sometimes sought to address, but may have further entrenched social differentiation.

The most significant marker of social difference in processes of agricultural commercialisation across the six APRA countries is the distinction between small-scale and large-scale producers.

Findings from the value chain studies discussed in this paper, show that larger farm, marketing and processing businesses had greater resilience capacities to deal with the immediate effects of COVID-19 on access to markets and labour.

The initial COVID-19 response showed that those who have abilities and capacities for resilience were able to move position within the value chain or even move to non-agricultural activities.

For the time being, COVID-19 is more of a shock that accentuates existing longer-term patterns of social differentiation.