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Building synergies between social protection and smallholder agricultural policies

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Publication date
21/01/2009
Number of Pages
26
Language:
English
Type of Publication:
Working Papers & Briefs
Focus Region:
Sub-Saharan Africa
Focus Topic:
Gender / Youth / Social Inclusion
Type of Risk:
Policy & institutional
Type of Risk Managment Option:
Risk reduction/mitigation
Commodity:
Other
Author
Rachel Sabates-Wheeler, Stephen Devereux, Bruce Guenther
Organization
Future Agricultures

The paper explores how social protection and agricultural policies interact, creating either synergies or conflicts between them. To the extent that social protection measures help poor rural people expand their assets, use them more efficiently and adopt higher return activities, there should be strong synergies with agricultural development. Reverse synergies can also arise, if agricultural policies help farmers improve their livelihoods and reduce their vulnerability. But conflicts can occur if policy objectives are inconsistent with each other, and these are also examined in this paper. We draw on numerous examples from the across the globe, but with specific emphasis from the African continent to highlight issues including, liquidity constraints, scale and threshold effects, timing, seasonality and policy complementarities. In conclusion we consider lessons for how the agricultural policies and social protection instruments can be designed and implemented to exploit welfare and growth synergies.