| The report, 2 volumes of it, of the UEMOA (West African Economic and Monetary Union, grouping together 8 countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo) Commission, "The Main Directions for Agricultural Policy for the UEMOA", is available on the opening page of the web site Agridoc (www.agridoc.com). What can we say about it? Brief Analysis of the Document This report contains some good analyses of the agricultural situation in the region. The context and the stakes of the agricultural policy in the region are well defined. We appreciate that report clearly says: a) "That the modernisation of family exploitations represents one of the major challenges for every agricultural policy at the heart of the region." b) "The difference between rural and urban incomes – a ratio of 1 to 4 for the region as a whole – reaches worrying proportions in Niger and Burkina Faso." C) "the necessity for growth in income in rural areas is not only a question of the fight against poverty. It is also the condition sine qua non for a better balance between the different regions of the Union and between the towns and the country-side. The Agricultural Policy of the Union (APU) is, then, one of the main instruments in the control of the migratory movements and the rural exodus at regional level; itself a necessary condition for social and political stability." d) "The defining of the main direction of the APU comes at a delicate moment; the revival of the commercial negotiations at the World Trade Organisation and the negotiations about free-trade with the European Union following the Cotonou Agreement… The UEMOA must use all its political weight and its special character, as a region made up of essentially less advanced countries, to persuade its partners to accept the principal of protection of its interior market" Much is still to be done: There is still much to do. This agricultural policy of the Union does not yet exist. The report is only proposals. Many of the sentences are in the future tense, or they begin with words such as: « it would be…" The APU must..." We read on page 12: « the coherence and the efficacy of the APU do not depend only on the pertinence of its objectives, but also on how capable it is to mobilise the necessary means to reach these objectives ». Volume 1 of the report finishes with a programme for action, which we are told is only indicative. "It will only be adopted according to the financial and human resources available to the UEMOA in the next few years ». All this is worrying. Is there really a political will to put into effect an agricultural policy in the Union?
A Necessity: The professional agricultural organisations need to pull out all stops to make themselves heard and to impose the real and effective setting up of a credible agricultural policy for the Union. The report affirms: "an agricultural policy can not simply be decreed: it is put together by all those concerned and especially the professional organisations and unions working in the sector. " These professional agricultural organisations could, for example, fix themselves an objective: that the need for the UEMOA to protect its agriculture by imposing import taxes on certain products, such as rice, be recognised by the WTO. There is no time to lose
Conclusion : There is still much to be done. But it is a tool that professional agricultural organisations of the region could use to their profit. | 
View from the South