Never has there been a more critical time for governments to scrutinise and scale-up their expenditure on food and agriculture. Over the last year, efforts to achieve Zero Hunger by 2030 were derailed further owing to COVID-19, with many more millions of people likely to have gone hungry, on top of the 690 million that already suffered from undernourishment before the pandemic hit societies worldwide. In sub-Saharan Africa, the geographic focus of this report, over 250 million are undernourished and hunger affects one out of five persons – more than twice the global average.

As hunger rises in the region, so do the challenges facing agriculture and food systems. More broadly, the need for economic recovery post-pandemic also calls for governments to step up resources and productive investments to create an enabling environment so that private investors’ aversion diminishes. Given the importance of agriculture for economic growth, employment, rural livelihoods, food production and so on in this region, the sector should be a
natural recipient of such investments for faster recovery.

Climate change, water scarcity, land degradation, food loss and limited access to finance and technology are holding back the transformation of Africa’s agriculture and food systems. So great are the challenges that the UN Secretary-General will convene a dedicated international summit this year to galvanize global action for healthier, more sustainable and equitable food systems.
Better food systems an d an economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa will mean governments looking closer at how and where they spend and invest in food and agriculture.

Almost twenty years on from the 2003 Maputo Declaration, which saw countries in the African Union commit to spend 10 percent of national budget to food and agriculture to drive socio-economic growth in the continent, many countries, including the 13 studied in this report, are struggling to do so.
This year we must seize the global attention on our agriculture and food systems to improve public expenditure monitoring systems and to pinpoint how and where funds should be best disbursed for food security, nutrition and agricultural production. We need to look at redirecting – and repurposing – investments that bring about agricultural transformation.

# Land degradation affects 65 per cent of Africa’s land area, and every year the continent loses about 3 million
hectares of forest (NEPAD et al., 2015). Deforestation is mainly caused by the conversion of forest land to agriculture.
# Africa is extremely vulnerable to climate change due to its high dependence on natural resources and limited adaptation capacity (Leal Filho et al., 2015). Without extensive adaptation and mitigation policies, the combined effects of natural resource degradation and climate change could hamper the agricultural growth that is needed to feed the continent’s rapidly growing population.

In response, African governments have committed to a sustainable pathway towards agricultural transformation that invests in, maintains, and sustains the ecological infrastructure on which agriculture and livelihoods depend.31 The increases in FLE expenditures described above could reflect national and international commitments to achieving agricultural development more sustainably.
Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Uganda and the United Republic of Tanzania, and are all part of the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative and have pledged to restore millions of hectares of forest land under the initiative. In addition, land management and forestry concerns

This report, Public expenditure on food and agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa: trends, challenges and priorities, provides us with over a decade’s worth of data and analysis on government spending on food and agriculture in 13 sub-Saharan African countries. It not only deals with how much is being spent by governments in support of the food and agricultural sector, but just as importantly, what funds are spent on. By breaking down expenditure and looking closely at budget allocations we can reveal trends and challenges. In this way, the report tackles key questions, inter alia: What are the most common types of food and agricultural expenditures in the region? Which spending categories have seen an uptick in the last years? How does this differ according to the level of development of a country?

This report seeks to find the answers to those questions and to provide policymakers, development partners and donors with recommendations for the future of public spending on food and agriculture, a sector that employs over half of sub-Saharan Africa’s active labour force.
Now more than ever before, the COVID-19 pandemic is making it more critical to look closer at public expenditure to scale up investments on transforming agriculture and food systems for better production, better nutrition, a better environment and a better life.