• 08 sectors, 592 billion FCFA
• Two years for all that?
• Could we do without administrative burdens?
Ln September 5, 2023, the Burkinabè learned that their food security is now dependent on a new benchmark: the 2023-2025 agropastoral and fisheries offensive. This comes a little more than three months after the Presidential Initiative for Agricultural Production 2023-2024, validated by the Council of Ministers on Wednesday, May 31, 2023. We should rejoice at the multiplicity of such bets whose aim is to allow every Burkinabè to eat their fill. The “2023-2025 agropastoral and fisheries offensive” is no exception to this rule. It aims to enable Burkina Faso to ensure its food sovereignty and the creation of at least 100,000 decent jobs in the agropastoral sector for young people, internally displaced persons (IDPs) and volunteers for the defense of the homeland (VDP). ).
Presenting the project, the Minister of Agriculture, Animal and Fisheries Resources, Ismaël Sombié, specified that priority was given to eight (08) sectors: rice, corn, potatoes, wheat, fish, livestock/meat, poultry and mango. The cost of the 2023-2025 agropastoral and fisheries offensive is 592 billion FCFA. This amount will be financed up to 46% by public resources. The remaining 54% of the budget, equivalent to 317 billion FCFA, will be financed by private resources.
Looking closely at the figures announced (see box), the first thing that strikes you is the duration of the offensive: two years. Word for word, two years for an offensive on an armed front may seem reasonable, but on the scale of the food security of a country, especially Burkina Faso, we can ask ourselves questions. Planners also recommend ten-year intervals to have the impacts of different public policies. The initiators may say that they will rely on what already exists, the obstacles also remain significant: the organization of the different actors, the mobilization of water resources, the mobilization of funds, dependence on from the outside…these are objective data which suggest that the “two years” may not be realistic. It is therefore not a question of a pharaonic project but of an intervention here and now to harvest by then. The fear in this situation is that the frantic search for results in a relatively short period of time will lead to the situation being scattered, the problems being brushed over and the results being exaggerated. If the country were led by a political party, we could have said that this offensive is akin to one of those actions with electoral aims, without basis, which plunges us into a cycle of eternal restart, just after each election.
Coordination between the different entities of the Administration could slow down the implementation of the offensive… these “small administrative burdens”. MPSR1 formalized the split between Agriculture and Water as a ministerial department and MPSR2 maintained this split. Nowhere in his opening statement did Minister Sombié, failing to have his colleague in charge of water at his side, make any mention of the policy of mobilizing this resource. However, agriculture and water are difficult to separate. Better still, the minister and his colleagues plan to produce “100,000 tonnes of fish, in order to cover half of national consumption needs”. This fish production will take place in which water?
Certain planned investments and actions such as “the realization of the 20,000 small ruminant breeders operation” and “the installation of 5 poultry breeders in each village of the country” need more explanation, because these indicators are already part of the daily life of the Burkinabè. Culturally or traditionally, a farmyard and/or a family of small ruminants are an integral part of every family in every village. The security crisis and the massive displacement of populations have led to the disruption of this system, of course, but from there to making a target of 20,000 small ruminant breeders and 40,000 poultry breeders (if we assume that the country has 8,000 villages) out of the 20 million Burkinabè people, there is still one step to take.
Moumouni SIMPORE
