Public Agricultural Expenditure Efficiency and Food Security in Sub-Saharan African Countries: Cash Crops or Food Crops?

This study investigates the Public Agricultural Expenditure Efficiency (PAEE) in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, focusing on the impact of the proportion of cash crops production on this efficiency. We first compute the Bias-corrected Technical Efficiency (BTE) Scores of 39 SSA countries from 2003 to 2017, using the Bootstrap Data Envelopment Analysis method, with per capita public agricultural expenditure as input, and food security indicators as output. Second, we assess the effect of cash crops share in harvested land (CSHL) on the PAEE using Beta regression. (i) our results show that in most SSA countries(79%), CSHL is on average less than 15%. (ii) findings indicate a significant positive effect of CSHL on the PAEE, suggesting that a higher proportion of cash crops in agricultural production enhances food security. (iii) results for SSA countries where CSHL is high are in line with the aim of the commitments made by African countries in Maputo (2003) declarations to fight hunger by allocating at least 10% of their public spending to agriculture—aligning with the Sustainable Development Goal of Zero Hunger by 2030. Our results are robust to a battery of robustness tests.