• PRSP critique

PRSP critique

Public spending on agriculture is now recognised to be an important means of promoting economic growth and alleviating poverty in rural areas. However, this paper reveals that agricultural spending is not being prioritised within current budgets and, in many cases, is actually falling. The paper is based on a recent study by Oxford Policy Management, which reviews global trends in public spending on agriculture using evidence from six case-study countries: Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, Argentina, and Vietnam.

Key findings from the case studies include:

• improved central public finance management systems combined with PRSPs have encouraged patterns of spending that disproportionately favour the social sectors over the productive sectors
• with the exception of Uganda and Vietnam, there has been a marked fall in agricultural expenditure as a share of AgGDP since 1980
• spending on agriculture relative to AgGDP is considerably lower in Africa than in the other two regions
• later generation PRSPs show an intention to increase expenditure on agriculture, but this could be undermined by a lack of stakeholder participation in the development of budget proposals.

The authors argue that the low share of spending allocated to agriculture should be of concern - especially in Africa, where agriculture and poverty are closely interlinked. Based on the study’s findings, they conclude that:

• greater attention needs to be paid to improving the quality and availability of data on the impact of spending
• mechanisms are needed for ensuring wider debate amongst sector stakeholders on the role of agriculture in growth and poverty reduction and how spending should be prioritised to achieve these objectives.
  

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