Food policy and state formation in Senegal and Uganda

ABSTRACT

Food policy is a predominantly overlooked vector of state formation in Africa. Comparing the trajectories of food policy in Senegal and Uganda, this article shows how internationally embedded food policies underpin state domination. It highlights three themes – early colonial food policies, the rise of organisational knowledge and the internationalisation of state domination through multilateral “assistance”. This argument is based on field research in both countries and on official documents and secondary literature. Its theoretical orientation draws upon a historical sociology of the State, as opposed to the idea of the heroic nation-state or the State as a component of “global ‘governance'”. We claim that food policy is highly politicised and that its effects on the State deserve much more attention in International Relations (IR), on the one hand, and state theory on the other. To study politics around food, we argue, would help to globalise IR.

KEYWORDS:

• Food policy
• food security
• Senegal
• state formation
• Uganda

Introduction

Africa accounts for 675 million food insecure people, and by 2030, if current trends are not addressed, the continent will have the highest undernourished population (51.5 per cent) (FAO et al. 2020, xix). This gives scepticism towards whether Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 will be reached, namely, to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture by 2030. Yet, apart from frequently occurring food riots in urban centres like in 2008 occurring across the globe and in 2011, 2012 in specific countries, the issue of food has not led to massive politicisation in African societies, nor has food security been high on the agenda of international summits like the G7. The discipline of international relations (IR) has also remained silent on the matter (Jachertz and Nützenadel 2011).¹

This article contributes towards closing this gap by showing how immensely political food policies have been. We argue that food provision security policies have been an overlooked vector of state formation in Africa. With this argument, we want to relate the discussion about state formation, on the one hand, to the discussion on the dynamics of social policy in the African continent on the other. While the role of material resources in state formation processes has been noted repeatedly (Elias 1975; Tilly 1975), the effects of food policies on state dynamics have strangely been overlooked. Scholars of state theory have shown little interest in agriculture², and scholars of food policy have opted to deal instead with pressing pragmatic concerns, showing little interest in state theory except for a few scholars dealing with food regimes. A focus on agriculture, food security and nutrition in any country requires analysis beyond national boundaries and has to consider transnational drivers. Therefore, we will look at the role of food policies in state formation from a historical sociology perspective on international politics. Since food production, distribution and consumption in food systems and regimes are part of a global political economy (see Bernstein 2016; McMichael 2009; Friedmann and McMichael 1989), which is historically structured.

We will show how food policies and state formation are related in Senegal and Uganda through a three-point comparison covering a) early colonial food policies, b) the rise of organisational knowledge, and finally c) the internationalisation of state domination through multilateral “assistance”. Apart from our own research, we draw upon a rather mixed state-of-the-art knowledge as food policy is a topic which scholars from many different disciplines have worked on (cf. Lang, Barling, and Caraher 2009; Reisch, Eberle, and Lorek 2013). Under often far-reaching aims such as “planetary well-being” (Helne and Salonen 2016), food policy research has addressed important facets like sustainable food consumption, the sustainability of food policies generally (Reisch, Eberle, and Lorek 2013), and the integration of the health and environmental dimensions of food policy (Lang, Barling, and Caraher 2009). The straddling position of this research across disciplinary boundaries and the dispersion of food policy among the many institutions and ministries dealing with it might have confused what food policy entails and whose responsibility it should be (Lang, Barling, and Caraher 2009).

The food literature is usually divided along with the key concepts of food security versus food sovereignty. On the one hand, food security was defined in 1996 by the FAO in Rome as meaning “that all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their food preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life” (IFPRI 2020). This concept mirrors the idea that food security is multi-dimensional and can be understood in various ways (Pinstrup-Andersen 2009). For a while already, it has been accepted that political factors often impede how food security is achieved (Jenkins and Scanlan 2001). Yet, the structuring effects of food policy have not become a subject of investigation.

The concept of food sovereignty, on the other hand, was debated during the same FAO summit and was presented as an alternative to neoliberal policies, focusing on the control by communities over the way food is produced, traded and consumed. This concept emerged from an international movement called La Via Campesina (cf. Laforge, Anderson, and McLachlan 2017; Beuchelt and Virchow 2012). Very few scholars have tried to integrate the concepts of food security and food sovereignty (see Wald and Hill 2016; Schanbacher 2010). Food security and food sovereignty are presented mainly in the literature as dual rather than complementary perspectives. It is important to note that SDG n°2 is rather about food security and inherent aspects than food sovereignty. As Lamouri and Olivier (2016, 25) argue, SDG n°2 does not mention food sovereignty at all. While we can identify both a rather political-technological and a politicising approach in this debate, we do not find any links to food policy as an essential element of state formation. This article will link these hitherto unconnected fields of research to one other. This applies to research on the social dimension of food policy, the colonial rule in general, and international organisations’ impact on the colonial and postcolonial rule (cf. Dimier 2004).

We will outline our theoretical viewpoint on state formation in the next section. It can be delineated from two prominent understandings of what a state is; namely, on the one hand, the heroic state of realist IR theories and, on the other hand, the State as it is conceived in liberal “global governance” approaches. We follow a historical sociology of the State that draws on the seminal authors of historical sociology like Max Weber, Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu.

In terms of methods, we have applied an open, reiterative comparison (cf. Friedrichs and Kratochwil 2009). This approach combines elements of historical comparativism with elements of a pragmatic philosophy of science. It mainly consists of constant refinement of arguments by continuous comparative case discussion on a collection of diversified material, infused with competing theoretical ideas for the final construction of the argument (cf. Swedberg 2014). Apart from secondary literature, this article's empirical material consists of sources collected during field stays in Uganda (12 weeks, Nov/Dec 2018; October 2019) and Senegal (3 weeks, Aug/Sep 2018; 12 weeks, Jan/Apr 2019). During these stays, newspaper articles, reports and official statistics, and public documents were collected. Semi-structured interviews, conversations, and background talks with stakeholders in different parts of both countries constitute the bulk of the authors’ primary data, in addition to field notes. While this approach cannot solely be classified as ethnography, it is a form of political science that includes both “immersion” and actors’ subjective views. It, thus, goes beyond official documents and mere numerical data (cf. Vrasti 2008; Schatz 2013).

However, the bulk of our text is devoted to interpreting our empirical material along the three themes mentioned above. We do not argue that this is an exhaustive list, nor do we ignore countless differences between the two case studies (Senegal and Uganda). Yet, for the sake of our argument, we focus on their similarities to show how policies affect and format what we call the State. In our conclusion, we highlight questions that we think result from our argument with regards to the state-of-the-art know-how on food policy.

State formation, not state building

Two theoretical understandings of the State prevail in the social sciences against which we would like to learn a third one that we believe overcomes the dominant two's weaknesses. The first understanding that we criticise is the heroic nation-state which dominates large parts of IR and State theory (cf. Krasner 1999). According to this understanding, the State is a fully-fledged, all-competent and cohesive organisation led by a well-informed and strategically acting government. However, historical analysis and sociological critique of the State have shown that this understanding is largely a product of 19th Century written European history (cf. Abrams 1977; Bourdieu 2012; Osiander 2000). The second understanding of the State that we criticise considers it to be an organisation among others, taking part in “global governance”, which is a functionalist theory about the provision of public goods (cf. Zürn 2018). We criticise this as an ahistorical understanding and comes with a normative prescription. All forms of political rule that do not live up to what is considered the Western standard are automatically deficient. Both understandings do not tell us much about the dynamics of states. As a way out of this impasse, we opt for a constructivist understanding as this avoids reifying the State as a cohesive entity with actor-like qualities. We see this understanding as being in line with growing literature in social anthropology (Bierschenk and de Sardan 2014) and political science (Badie/Birnbaum 1979; Birnbaum 2014; Migdal/Schlichte 2005; Mitchell 1991; Nugent/Suhail 2018; Schlichte 2005). And with older debates on state formation, which offer an alternative to the rather political-technological notion of “state-building” (cf. Bliesemann De Guevara 2012).

With the concept of state formation, we try to capture the process by which the State's image as a coherent and controlling territorial political order becomes a leading figure in the political imagination. This is a shared understanding of not just recent “culturalist” state theories (e.g. Abrams 1977; Mitchell 1991) but also the shared neo-Kantian heritage of the political sociology of Max Weber, Norbert Elias or Pierre Bourdieu. For all of them, the State is basically a “symbolic form”.³ State formation, then, is the encroachment and generalisation of the State's language, its categories and its compartmentalisation of social life so that the’ State's concepts become orientations in discourse and practices.

The concept of state formation has received scholarly attention among Africanists as well. Valsecchi's (2011) “Power and State Formation in West Africa” focuses on the area that is now Ivory Coast and Ghana from the 16th to the 18th Century. It addresses the formation of territories and ruling groups by looking at their political, economic, and military actions, similar to much later post-conflict situations (cf. Dijkema et al. 2010; Veit 2010). From these works, it becomes clear how far-reaching state formation dynamics are. They include schooling, the registration of land titles, the “officialisation” of all kinds of claims and objects, infrastructure, the encroachment of the ‘State's administrative language into everyday life and the attribution of social dynamics as being “the state's” deeds (cf. Bourdieu 2012).

To think about state formation instead of state-building means to look at the long processes of how political domination changes, hardens out or fragments, and how the State becomes a more or less cohesive and dominant symbolic order. Instead of having a fixed, normatively-loaded understanding of the State as a supreme organisation of a given people on a given territory, state formation theory assesses power relations and how dominant the State's image and its language become in these relations. “The state”, then, is not an overarching, cohesive actor-like organisation but a culturally-produced form of belief that creates the image of a cohesive institution. This understanding of state formation dates back to more than a 100-year-old elucidation of Max Weber ([1904] 2012):

When we ask what, in empirical reality, corresponds to the idea [that we have] of the “state”, we find an infinite number of diffuse and discrete human actions and acts of acquiescence, and of relationships regulated in practice and legally, of which some are unique, while others recur regularly; and all [this] is held together by an idea, namely, the belief in norms and relations of domination of some human beings over others, which are actually or should be valid. This belief is found in manifold nuances in the mind of each individual, partly intellectually well thought-out, partly vaguely felt, [and] partly passively accepted.

(Weber [1904] 2012, 130).

With this understanding, it becomes possible to describe how state domination emerges, transforms or is suspended. On this basis, we further argue, it is possible to describe historically differentiated “trajectories of states” (Bayart 1991). In fact, state formation projects can be very specific; some are rather centrally oriented, while others lean towards federal orders. Some draw on legitimising their rule by using social justice, while others are centred around strong ideas of nations around civil liberties or private property. State formation processes can entail deliberate policies, but they are never entirely intentional. As a result of conflict-ridden dynamics, we see different outcomes of how statehood looks empirically, both among welfare states in the OECD (cf. Esping-Anderson 1990; Hall and Soskice 2001) and in other parts of the world (Bayart 1994; Schlichte 2018a, 2018b). As we want to demonstrate in the following section, policies play an essential role in state formation. They let the State and its symbolic order appear together as agents of “development” and “food security”. While the foundations of this image of the State go far back into the pre-colonial past, it was the colonial agricultural policy that inscribed the State into the socio-political landscape.

How food policies formed the state

State formation is seen mainly as an urban phenomenon. It is in capitals and bigger cities that state agencies have their headquarters, employ massive personnel and structure everyday life with spatial and temporal arrangements such as infrastructure, traffic rules, schools, work hours etc. In agrarian societies, however, it is the countryside that conclusively determines what the State is. The majority of the workforce in both Senegal and Uganda is active in agriculture. In Senegal, urbanisation has approached 50 per cent only recently, while in Uganda, three-quarters of the population still lives outside bigger cities, according to World Bank figures (World Bank 2021). Although large chunks of the contemporary economy in both countries are bigger than its agricultural component – in terms of monetarised value production, according to official figures – the social realities we summarise as Senegal or Uganda are largely the realities of the countryside. Our argument, therefore, addresses state formation in the countryside. Since colonial times, governments in both cases have tried to shape social realities (cf. Buell 1928; Cooper 2002). We will present three dynamics of food policy that, as we argue, have been at work in state formation. We will present each dynamic in its abstract form first and then explain how it unfolded in both cases.

Imperial “mise en valeur” – the state and the soil

In many cases in Africa, colonial governments used incentives and coercion to expand cash crop cultivation (Amin 1972). While imperial governments were fully aware of the trade-off between cash crop and food-crop cultivation, both British and French colonial governments needed to create taxable economies to fund the apparatus of colonial rule. Liberal criticism of the costly imperial adventures necessitated these measures if the colonies were maintained (cf. Hobson 1902). In Senegal as in Uganda, cash crop production expanded massively, and it created a path-dependent change in agriculture that would affect the provision of food for decades. The colonial State entered the fields; through state policies, the soil became an object of planning, formatting, market production, and people's dislocation and resettlement. While in the cases of Uganda and Senegal, cash crops became important as direct exports that could be taxed, with the productive soil in the cases of colonial rent economies relying on mineral exports, food production became important for deliveries to mine workers and cities. In sum, marketable food production became a major aim of colonial rule, and its resulting policies brought the State to the countryside. To some extent, one might argue, the current Sustainable Development Goal # 2 about “Zero Hunger” is still addressing this asymmetry of that time as usually extreme poverty and hunger have been predominant in rural areas during colonial times. This already necessitated focusing on increasing both agricultural and food production (Rickards and Shortis 2019, 2).

Since this period of imperial world market integration, the contradiction between food security via food crop production on the one hand, and the taxability of the economy, leading to cash-crop cultivation, on the other hand, has been in-built into African cash-crop economies (cf. Amin 1972). In Senegal and Uganda, the turn towards cash-crop production was not achieved by foreign settlers but instead by “indigenous” farmers.

In Senegal's case, the colonial government opted to produce the groundnut cash crop to make the colony profitable. The Murid Muslim Sufi brotherhood became a carrier group of the emerging economy. They took over groundnut production and developed into a decisive intermediary between the colonial State and the rural population (Péhaut 1961; Couty 1982). Thus, the colonial agricultural policy had not just economic consequences but also affected the colonial society's social stratification fundamentally. The massive support for groundnut production led to the neglect of subsistence agriculture. To remediate this heightening issue, the French colonial State started importing rice from Indochina. This new staple food was thus a creation of the imperial State. As Noba et al. (2014, 2) have stated, groundnut has remained the leading agricultural crop in Senegal, and it is still central to the rural economy.

In the Protectorate of Uganda, the production of cotton became the solution to how the Protectorate could be financed. Through a violently enforced hut tax and promises of cash, farmers were induced to produce cotton as an exportable good. This allowed for sufficient tax income, later supplemented by export levies (cf. Mamdani 1976, chap. 4). Famines occurred, endangering both the “protectorate's” international reputation in terms of how it would care for “the natives” (cf. Dimier 2004), as well as the availability of a healthy workforce. Consequently, food granaries became obligatory in those areas where harvests were unstable, and in some areas like Teso, farmers were obliged to reserve at least a quarter of an acre for sweet potato and cassava cultivation (Vail 1972, 108). As a result of this intervention, the colonial State had massively reshaped agriculture's structure, further inventing an entirely new technology of measuring nutrition and health in the colony with surveys and consumption standards. In a very literal sense, one could say the State had become a part of the landscape.

The creation and growth of organisational knowledge

In both the British and the French empire, we view the 1940s as the decade that allowed for limited political openings. Both imperial governments tried to bolster their image with “welfare” and “development” measures. The creation of medical schools, agricultural training and also schemes like the “Colonial Development and Welfare Act” (CDWA) of 1940, along with its predecessor of 1929, and the Fond d'Investissement pour le Devéloppement Economique et Social (FIDES) of 1946 in the French Third Republic, all have to be read in this manner. Both FIDES and the CDWA were investment initiatives for the development of colonial capitalism. Yet, such measures initiated the first wave of the bureaucratisation and scientisation of colonial societies. What was needed now was a form of bureaucratic knowledge beyond tax registers and trade statistics. This included land registers, scientific knowledge about tropical agriculture, and the professionalisation of farming through a system of schools, including the entire engineering of agriculture. One of the main results of these measures was that the State's descriptions became the language of measurement and evaluation for entire societies.

The “discovery” of a nutritional problem, some scholars argue in retrospect, was perhaps more an outcome of an “African exceptionalism” that required a “civilising mission” (Nott 2019, 4). It is difficult to judge how far the worries surrounding nutritional problems during colonial times were justified, and to what extent they were rather the outcome of an external medical paradigm that constructed a problem to justify colonial rule and professional status. The novel interest in the food situation came about, these scholars argue, as “the result of ideas and techniques developed in the context of metropolitan science and then transferred to the colonies through nutritional specialists” (Arnold 1994, 2). These images emerged in British India and moved from there to other British colonies. Initially, the need for an able-bodied workforce spurred the practice of observing the population's nutritional status, seemingly in South Asia and other colonies.

Since World War II, we argue that both Senegal and Uganda had a problem that became a part of their state formation – the question of feeding and nourishing well a growing population was no longer a domestic concern. It became rather an issue that had to be dealt with carefully because its answers could have repercussions across the empires and the international standing of both Britain and France. From the last decades of colonial rule onwards, the counting of bodies and their assessment along medical standards has been a form of state encroachment into the social sphere that has largely remained unnoticed. The rise of international organisations from 1944 onwards, i.e. the international “machinery of government” of IOs (Charles 1968, 294), meant that the introduction of such standards and measurements not only led to them becoming the tools of a constant regional and international comparison, but also of the language of state policies and, finally, of popular parlance. Thus, our argument concerning state formation is that the interlinked processes of imperial and international health and nutritional statistics and their ensuing food policies have to be seen as vectors of state formation.

In Uganda, the Colonial Office had already started a programme on agricultural and medical research in the colonies under Governor L.S. Amery (1925–29) (Wicker 1958, 174). Missionaries from the 1880s had offered medical services, and in 1917 a medical school for nurses, medical officers and midwives opened. Observations surrounding health and nutrition took a more scientific turn, occurring increasingly in statistical terms. The UK's Medical Research Council's tropical nutrition unit also resided in Uganda from 1940 until the 1970s (Nott 2019, 4). The connection between nutrition and health became a major concern, in particular during World War II. Food production was enhanced during the war, not the least through increasing agricultural training capacities with a scientific background. “Agricultural assistants” who were to consult farmers were planned for all counties in the early 1960s (Jameson 1970, 5), but the consultancy had already started early on, with “gardening” as a compulsory subject even in primary schools (Bude 1983, 342). The “scientisation of societies” (Weingart 1983) had already started affecting Uganda during colonial times. In retrospect, this was just an announcement of its enormous power developed in later decades. The systematic annual reporting of the climate, food production, and health by all district commissioners was already the norm by the 1950s.⁴

In relation to the rise of organisational knowledge, Senegal's situation under colonial administration greatly resembles that of Uganda. From the 1920s up until the 1950s, there were high concerns about addressing the food issue and other aspects of the colonised populations’ welfare. State-generated and controlled statistics and measures became a priority which, in the process, shaped the formation and dynamics of the colonial State. How famines and failure to address the colonies’ food situation would impact France and Britain's international standing was pivotal in informing their response to food issues. Albert Sarraut, the minister of the colonies, and Jules Carde, the governor-general of French West Africa, spoke in the early and mid-1920s of the need to increase the population to produce and build the wealth France expected from its colonies. As Van Beusekom (1999, 200) explained, “Faire du nègre’ was Carde's term for this approach, and it served as a rationale for improving public health services and promoting food production.” In February 1938, Marius Moutet, the then-minister of the colonies, sent a questionnaire about food rations to each colony, requesting that every governor spread this within each administrative circumscription. The aim was to create “nutritional knowledge” (Bonnecase 2009, 160). Looking at what we nowadays call socioeconomic classes, this kind of demographic survey for collecting data about the wealthy, well-doers and poor families and their nutritional intake was very new. The creation and growth of organisational knowledge through such surveys underscored the politics of food and how food policy shaped state formation.

In the interwar period, statistics based on production figures and stock granaries’ surveillance were the two forms of food-related knowledge available. What emerged was knowledge based on subsistence production indicators rather than on households’ nutritional indicators. A few years after World War II and shortly before independence, malnutrition among children became a significant concern acknowledged as a nutritional scourge. Consequently, in May 1946, the governor-general of the Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF)⁵, René Barthès, created by decree the “Organization of Surveys for the Study of Indigenous Peoples”.⁶ The legitimacy crises of colonial powers within the global context of the WWII aftermath forced France and other colonial powers to produce knowledge about their overseas populations’ living conditions, especially food. This became a prominent feature of colonial research and measurement. This is also a direct effect of the Conference held earlier in 1943 in Hot Springs, Virginia, where it was agreed upon to improve the living conditions of colonised populations and international organisations’ will to know what was going on within those empires.⁷ Yet, by the mid-1940s, agricultural officials began to express concern about population growth, and by the late 1950s and early 1960s, mainstream French agronomists identified rapid population growth as a serious impediment to rural development. They referred to the number of inhabitants potentially able to pay taxes or those falling into this category. As noted by Van Beusekom (1999, 198), “For much of the colonial era, officials were more concerned with taxation than the demographic method and relied on enumerations rather than censuses to compile their population statistics.”

Many efforts were undertaken to develop agricultural knowledge in the French-speaking countries of sub-Saharan Africa in an ever more sophisticated form. Picard (2019), having analysed agricultural and agronomic research in Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa about four decades after World War II, hinted towards documentation forms such as reviews or those addressing norms and inventories or varieties of botanical and crop species. For the 1950s, Bonnecase (2008, 21) listed further forms such as demographic surveys and periodic reports either from the colonial administration⁸or the new independent administration or international organisations (e.g. World Health Organization 1955). The French focused more on crisis rather than structural hunger or malnutrition. The State of knowledge was quasi-non-existent when evaluating the “ration alimentaire” in the 1940s (Bonnecase 2009, 152). From a regional position, knowledge production has known many forms. This is due to different sets of actors involved – the colonial administration, the new independent administration and international organisations. The colonial administration acknowledged that a high population density was essential for economic growth and civilisation. In that period, the creation of demographic knowledge was considered crucial for handling rural development. Overall, empirical studies about food were scarce, but they became increasingly bureaucratic and scientific. Their international and national production tended to be the same (Van Beusekom 1999). The first Senegalese Quadrennial Economic and Social Development Plan of 1961 and other instruments produced the initial postcolonial knowledge on nutrition, social protection, and agriculture (Spray 2018, 1). After Senegal's independence, attained in 1960, multilateral agreements increased and led to the internationalisation of state formation.

From independence to the introduction of the Structural Adjustment Programmes, there has been an ongoing colonial type of agricultural policy of groundnut focus and therefore an increase of food importation dependency in Senegal (Dieng 1996; Duruflé 1988, 1995) that resulted in a shift from state interventionism to state withdrawal and the implication of external actors such as NGOs, European governmental development agencies and UN agencies both in Senegal (Sall 2011) and Uganda (Schlichte 2008) which in both contexts highlighted the internationalisation of state formation.

The state-effect of multilateral Aid

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, both Uganda and Senegal were confronted with “structural adjustment programs” (SAPs), presented by the World Bank (WB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a necessary condition for obtaining additional loans on the international financial market and by the International Financial Institutions (IFI) themselves. Meanwhile, it is established that SAPs led to a shrinking of state capacities as public sectors were reduced, markets were liberalised, public employment was downsized, and user fees for public services were also introduced. However, we argue, although at first sight, this process seemed to minimise the realm of the State, it nevertheless triggered state formation as well, yet this time of an internationalised state (cf. Schlichte 2008).⁹ That resonates with Nye and Keohane’s (1987) complex interdependence theory in showing that there are “reciprocal connections between domestic politics and international structure and the transmission belts between them” (Nye and Keohane 1987, 745). Although states situate themselves in global markets where “[…] power depends on geographically based institutions” where countries are connected by multiple social and political relationships (Keohane and Nye 1998, 82–83). In Uganda, the new figuration of internationalised rule, i.e. multilaterally-enhanced state formation, can be studied like in a show case (cf. Schlichte 2008). The end of a civil war and of a decade of state decay coincided in the case of Uganda with the new neoliberal policy agenda of the international financial institutions. This allowed for a much more radical recalibration of what the State ought to be than in other cases with stronger institutional continuity, like Senegal. Meanwhile, Uganda's ruling groups have fully adopted the World Bank's modernist thinking (cf. Lie 2015), coinciding with the construction of a political class that is entrepreneurial throughout (cf. Tangri and Mwenda 2019). Consequently, state policies have become a powerful vector of creating political loyalty and dependencies, as political and entrepreneurial interest are closely knit together in this new accumulation regime that constitutes the State.

Food policy in Uganda is no exception to this new mode of state formation. Internationalised policies orchestrated by ministries mainly drive it, yet largely funded by external donors. This scheme dates back to the “Rural Development Plan” of 1987 as a framework for reorienting an agricultural sector that had largely fallen back to subsistence. The following policy, the “Plan for Modernisation of Agriculture” (PMA) of 2000, tied in with the “Poverty Eradication Action Plan” (PEAP) of 1997, was a follow-up of this general framework. Simultaneously, former cooperatives, which used to be important power-blocs of farmers, were brought under government control by turning them into “authorities” through parliament acts. This was the fate of the Uganda Coffee Development Authority, Cotton Development Organization, and Dairy Development Authority.¹⁰ Since then, “national policies”, often designed along with internationalised schemes and on donor initiatives, have been used to distribute inputs such as seed and micro-credit schemes to enhance food production along the lines of political allegiances (cf. Joughin and Mette 2010). This, according to farmers and their representatives, applies not only to the regional distribution patterns but also to the mode of who is getting what in single districts.¹¹ Thus, the internationalisation of state formation works like a translation of external forces into domestic politics, done by the regime to foster its power base. State formation, which is the figurative inscription of the State as a symbolic order, is an unintended outcome of this dynamic, as a pivotal role is ascribed to the State in this figuration, being addressed from both the international and domestic arenas as the central actor.

That food policy has become a vector of this dynamic because some Western donors have decided to pay more attention to “rural development” once again.¹² The large funds for post-war rehabilitation in Northern Uganda or the neglected districts of Karamoja also contributed to the new dynamic in agriculture and food production.¹³ While the share of external funding in state expenses has decreased in Uganda during the last years, the government has still received between 1.5 and 2 billion USD in official developmental aid per year during the previous 15 years (World Bank 2020), which is roughly about a third of the central government's budget. Large chunks of aid are channelled through the Office of the Prime Minister, a practice that NGOs view with scepticism as they observe heavy political interference in the distribution of funds.¹⁴

The new-found attention towards food and agriculture has found its expression within a proliferation of policies that have been developed in close cooperation with “international partners”, like the “Uganda Food and Nutrition Policy” (2003), the “National Animal Feeds Policy” (2005), the “National Agricultural Extension Policy” (2016) and the “National Seed Policy” (2018).¹⁵ At different levels in developing these policies, the underlying research and implementation by project internationalisation makes it hard to disentangle the domestic political effort and organisational frame from the international discourse, research, and policy scheme. While the Ugandan government claims authorship, both the discourse and resources of these policies are not of domestic origin. Thus, state formation becomes internationalised.

The most recent policy in Uganda, “Operation Wealth Creation” (OWC), launched in July 2013, however serves as a vernacularisation of agricultural modernisation. This policy replaced the “National Agricultural Advisory Service” (NAADS), an extension service designed like in late colonial times to consult farmers on agricultural techniques, including a distributional element (seeds, seedlings, heifers, etc.). With OWC, military personnel took over the agricultural extension service, now organised along with political allegiances, externally supported as a measure of the “scommercialisation of agriculture”.¹⁶ The policy consists mainly of the distribution of seedlings and seeds and giving heifers to impoverished farmers. Needs assessments are done locally, but there seem to be immense coordination problems due to a lack of agricultural knowledge among the managing military personnel.¹⁷ While the government is presenting the policy as an effort to overcome corruption and inefficiencies within agricultural policies, we could interpret its effects as the regime's attempt to strengthen its grip on rural areas to mobilise voters. Through this mechanism, the policy becomes another vector of state formation.

The fact that multilateralisation is “multilevel governance” and a form of control at the same time (see Meny and Yves 2000) is evident in Uganda and Senegal.¹⁸ Unlike Uganda, Senegal's postcolonial history has been peaceful,¹⁹ yet the greater role of developmental aid in it in the form of SAPs reinforced the internationalisation of policy-making and multilaterally-enhanced state formation.²⁰ The Senegalese ruling party accepted international financial institutions’ prescriptions and adopted a neoliberal policy agenda, thereby increasing its vulnerability to multilateral domination. The control over African states in the aftermath of the SAPs through social funds, targeted safety nets, poverty reduction, good governance and direct budgetary support has been widely explored by scholars (see Devereux and White 2010, 64). Besides, NGOs emerged and took greater responsibility in social service delivery when the reach and effectiveness of most African governments weakened considerably (Holmes and Lwanga-Ntale 2012).²¹ The increasing use of multilateral aid in influencing Senegal's state formation creates the impression among state officials that aid is political and, according to local perceptions, the one who pays is the one who leads.²² Of importance to the achievement of attainting zero hunger, actors’ actions alignment is a prerequisite to reach that goal as Veldhuizen et al. (2020, 2) present the “missing middle” is the disconnection of both food producers and food consumers in the globalised food system be it local, national or transnational.

Work on food and nutrition has occurred in the form of a platform of operationalisation²³ at the heart of the international State – of a “conglomerate of local, ‘national’, and international agencies and forces” (Schlichte 2018b, 105). Although SAPs were binding, they did not erase state authority. In Senegal, this translated into the State's disengagement and increased privatisation. Nonetheless, the State also engaged itself through local initiatives, creating new kinds of partnerships and interactions. This reflects a form of institutional construction that reconfigured state governance (Ndongo 2015, 2). In 1984, the State introduced the new “Programme Agricole”, which led to its disengagement from agricultural value chains, the reduction of subsidies and the abolition of the Agricultural Program, which was the primary source of inputs such as seeds for farmers in the following years (Dieng and Gueye 2005, 14). The decade from 1985 onwards revealed a difficult time for the State regarding agriculture and the economy. Severe droughts in the 1970s and 1980s, and the consequent bad harvests, led to an urban exodus.

During this time, the government created some tools to support and encourage farming activity. From 1979 onwards, there were numerous national organs in charge of addressing food and nutritional issues: to cite a few, the Caisse de Péréquation et de Stabilisation des Prix, which replaced the Office National de Coopération et d'Assistance pour le Développement (ONCAD)²⁴, or the Commissariat à la sécurité alimentaire (CSA). In 1980, ONCAD was liquidated and privatised, which “marked the beginning of the state disengagement from trade in agricultural products and input supply” (Faye et al. 2007, 58). In 1982 and 1983, Senegal had a deficit of 300,000 tons of staple food partly covered by emergency food aid (Diagne 2011, 41). This change launched the long period of the State's withdrawal from agricultural economic management and the large-scale privatisation of state-owned companies (Faye et al. 2007), as demanded by “donors”. This meant that such roles were taken over by multilateral agencies, allowing them greater opportunity to influence and shape food policies.²⁵ Accordingly, the agencies now determined state formation.

Generally, multilateralism and “NGO-isation” dominated food policy and national decision-making in Senegal and Uganda. Consequently, the importance of the State as a symbolic order declined. In 2013, the reform of the third Decentralisation Act reshaped the territorial action possible by the State (Sarr 2015). This has been done through programmes such as the Programme of Support to Municipalities and Agglomerations Senegal (PACASen) (Banque Mondiale and République du Sénégal 2017, 4), and partnerships were encouraged by national organisations, such as the Association of Mayors of Senegal, or with UN agencies (Sané 2016). Although there is a political will to address specific issues at the national level, a long-term vision has not been prioritised since the State has to act within the dictates of a short-term means for funding and to improve the daily life of citizens (Ndiaye 2010, 38; Ba 2015; Dia 2019). In addition, the Plan Sénégal Emergent that created the Bourse à la Sécurité Familiale (a cash transfer programme) has been perceived by local actors as clientelist and primarily meant to win the electorate rather than consciously addressing their needs.²⁶

When it comes to these internationalised aspects, many domains are of concern, such as borders, land use, environmental protection and conservation.²⁷ Overall, in both Senegal and Uganda, policy-making has been infiltrated and dominated by multilateralism, international hegemonic capitalist institutions and international non-governmental organisations (INGOs).

Conclusion

This article has shown that food policy is a neglected dimension within research on state formation. Despite food security and nutrition is a principal area of social policy and included in the SDGs, how food policy relates to political rule has mainly remained under-explored. Since international engagement and policy-making have not been academically politicised when it comes to food security and nutrition in countries like Senegal or Uganda, neither have they been sufficiently prioritised within IR. Accordingly, this article has sought to address this gap by demonstrating that food policies are, and continue to be, highly political and influence state formation. The debate around the competing concepts of food sovereignty and food security (cf. Bernstein 2014) epitomises, in our view, the current politicisation of the food question in academia, but so far, this discussion has been restricted to specialised journals such as Food Security, Food Ethics or the Journal of Peasant Studies. The old colonial dilemma of whether food or cash crops should be promoted more is in our view, still at the heart of this debate. The two positions also stand for two different views on statehood: on the one hand, food security stands for a liberal regime that prefers the exchange of exported cash crops on world markets for imported food. On the other hand, food sovereignty implies a more producer-oriented perspective on national development that would privilege local consumption and food crop production. In that regard, food policy will continue to be part of state formation processes, in one way or the other.

Our main argument, however, concerns the historical features of the food policy-state formation nexus. To address lacunae in exploring how food policy shapes state formation in Senegal and Uganda, we restricted the article to three areas; namely, early colonial food policies, the rise of organisational knowledge, and the internationalisation of state domination through multilateral “assistance”.

The increase of bilateral and or multilateral policy development that led to the conclusion of internationalised state formation questions accountability and leads to the question of who takes responsibility since both the discourse and resources of these policies are not of domestic origin (see Morcillo Laiz and Schlichte 2016; Schlichte 2017; Schlichte 2018b). While we see a need for further historical investigation on how food policies and state formation have been connected, we would even more highlight the necessity to bring food politics on the agenda of global politics and international relations as academic disciplines. It might not be accidental that such a vital question has not received any attention in international politics journals as hunger and malnutrition are no longer big topics in Western Europe and North America. Food is an existential topic for millions of people in other world regions, and due to globalised markets, it is an international affair. That it is a political one too, is what we wanted to stress here.

We consider thus our research as a contribution towards globalising IR by going beyond its current focus and opening up to broader topics, problems, disciplines and other parts of the world (see Bilgin 2010; Acharya 2014). The issue of food, particularly in Africa, has, in our view, huge potential to revitalise IR as a critical, global and – literally – “down to earth” social science. In our view, further research is needed both on the conceptual and theoretical level and empirically. Beyond state formation, what theories help us to come to terms with the intricacies of globalised food markets, the politics of nutrition deficits and rural social change? Are “food security” and “food sovereignty” the best concepts to understand what is at stake? How are, for example, global consumption patterns, market dynamics and food policies related? Sufficient nutrition, we would assume, is not just a question of economic growth but an utterly political subject too.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the by the [Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) in the framework of the Collaborative Research Project 1342] under Grant project [no. 374666841]. We are grateful to Alex Veit and Anna Wolkenhauer for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. Special thanks to the reviewers for their enthusiasm and constructive comments.

Notes on contributors

Alex Nadège Ouedraogo

Alex Nadège Ouedraogo is a Belgo-Burkinabè political scientist specialising in social policy in West Africa, currently employed at the University of Bremen. A political scientist by training, she combines socio-anthropological approaches with her background and being an ethnographer. Her current doctoral thesis investigates food and agriculture-related social policies in Senegal. Alex Nadège Ouedraogo is an early career researcher and holds a Master of Political Science specialisation in International Relations and Humanitarian Aid from the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. Moreover, she is also interested in West African geopolitics.

Klaus Schlichte

Prof. Dr Klaus Schlichte is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Bremen. His research focuses on the history of international relations, war and dynamics of political domination. He has conducted extensive research in Senegal, Mali, Liberia, Uganda, France and Serbia. He is the author of Theorien der Gewalt (with T. Koloma Beck, 2014), In the Shadow of Violence. The politics of armed groups (2009), of prize-winning Der Staat in der Weltgesellschaft. Politische Herrschaft in Afrika, Asien und Lateinamerika (2005) and of the edited volumes The Dynamics of States. The Formation and Crisis of State Domination outside the OECD (2005) and Extended Experience. The Political Anthropology of Internationalized Politics (ed. with S. Biecker) (2021).

Notes

1 There are several journals where food is a prominent topic (e.g. Food Security, Food Ethics, Peasant Studies) nonetheless, when it comes to IR journals, it becomes a rarer topic.

2 The exception being works from a historical sociology perspective like Moore (1966), Skocpol (1995) or Migdal (1974, 1988). It has been a subject of historical sociology early on (cf. Weber [1897] 1988).

3 The notion of the “symbolic form” has been most prominently developed by Ernst Cassirer, undergirding his notes on the state (1946). For a recent reformulation of it in IR, see Bartelson (2014). Such a constructivist understanding of the state comes to the fore in various disciplines (cf. Steinmetz 2003; Brooke, Strauss, and Greg 2018).

4 Madi Sub-District Annual Reports 1944-1946, Toro District Annual Reports 1954-56, Mountains of the Moon University Archive, Box 414, Fort Portal, Uganda.

5 This article refers to the French name of French Western Africa, Afrique Occidentale Française and its acronym A.O.F.

6 The official French name was the Organisme d’enquête pour l’étude anthropologique des populations indigènes de l’AOF, but in common use was referred to as Mission Anthropologique.

7 The Hot Springs Conference laid the basis for what would become the FAO.

8 For example, in 1950, researchers of the Comité de liaison des organismes de recherche agricoles spécialisés outre-mer (Clorasom) set up 129 trials to replace fallow land (Picard 2019).

9 For further evidence on how liberalization enhanced the state’s grip see the contributions in Hibou (1998) about the privatization of States, see also Pankhurst (1998).

10 Source: Interview with former minister, Kampala, October 13, 2019.

11 Source: Group interview with farmers in Eastern district, October 21, 2019.

12 To illustrate this trend of supporting rural development by donors, in Senegal, the Agence Française de Développement (AFD) funded a research and development project to support inter-village cooperation from 1989 to 1994 for a total amount of 700.000 French Franc (Bosc et al. 2003, 14). In Uganda, for example, the renewed interest of the German ministry for development cooperation under a minister from a rural area, has led to renewed engagement for the subject (Kloeckner 2021).

13 Source: Interview with Western diplomat, Kampala, October 17, 2019.

14 Source: Interview with NGO director, Kampala, October 14, 2019.

15 Source: Interview with representative of the Uganda Federation of Farmers’ Association, Kampala, October 24, 2019.

16 Source: Interview with consultant; former official of Ministry of Local Government, November 21, 2018, Kampala.

17 Source: Group interview with farmers in Eastern district, October 21, 2019.

18 Source: Interview with director of national institution, Dakar, March 5, 2019.

19 There is, however, the exception of the armed conflict (1990-2005) opposing the secessionist “Mouvement des forces démocratiques de Casamance” (MFDC) and the Senegalese state.

20 Source: Interview with director of national institution, Dakar, March 5, 2019.

21 Although this is nothing new if we refer to our previous sections and, according to Schlichte (2018a, 2018b), multilateralization was already present in colonial and early post-independence periods.

22 Source: Interview with director of national institution, Dakar, March 5, 2019.

23 Source: Interview with coordinator of national institution, Dakar, February 28, 2019.

24 This Equalization and Stabilization Fund has been numerously cited by different actors, met as an important state intervention tool. Source: Community “officer” leaders, Kaïré in Thiès region, February 7, 2019 and interview with head of national institution, March 20, 2019.

25 Source: Interview with vulnerability analyst of a UN agency, Dakar, March 9, 2019.

26 Source: Interview with the president, treasurer, and general secretary of a federation of peasants, along with two of the community workers, Diourbel, March 25, 2019.

27 To illustrate, in terms of environment, Senegal and other Sahelian countries have embarked on the construction of a Great Green Wall from Senegal to Djibouti launched in 2005 and adopted by the African Union in 2007 to preserve the environment and produce magnets in the Sahelian zone. Once again, the international involvement is great for example, the European Union (EU) in its various commitments (Paris Agreement and in view of the COP26) is one of the world's largest donors for the climate. The EU also supports the African Great Green Wall initiative (United Nations 2020; UNCCD n.d). Besides, in terms of borders, the existence of a memorandum of understanding linking Senegal and Mauritania in the movement of livestock exposes the close links between land tenure, inter-ethnic problems and the drawing of borders, which still today has a major impact on access to food and the construction of a national identity (Ba 1989; Fresia 2009). Cross-border traffic has led to various conflicts and consequences between the two countries.