1.1 The issue
1.2 Methodology
For a long time food security policies focused mainly on the rural population, for which reason consumers were not seen as separate actors from producers. It was presumed that consumers meet their food needs wholly through subsistence production and obtain any additional supplies through barter. The sale of farm produce was seen much more as the disposal of a surplus than a calculated response to demand.
Although during the colonial period and the 1960s, some level of subsistence production occurred in towns and cities, there was also a tradition of marketing agricultural produce in a way that followed commercial strategies and involved various actors. The dominant model at the time, which perceived self-sufficiency as producers’ sole objective, reflected more a planners’ preconception than an objective analysis of farmers’ production and marketing strategies.
“Administered development” has been the most widely accepted approach in the supply and distribution sphere, particularly for staples, and has consisted in encouraging or discouraging the consumption of specific foods through administrative measures. For a long time this approach disguised the determining role of demand (i.e. the consumer) in favour of state-orchestrated supply. The consumer was completely marginalised, mainly because planners in Africa shaped consumption patterns in order to facilitate the pursuit of objectives that conformed to their preconceived ideas and models.
Rapid expansion of the informal sector and parallel markets, widespread failure of different regulatory policies, tax evasion and corruption characterised the “administered development” model and highlighted the need to take account of consumer demand as a major factor influencing the behaviour of various actors in food supply and distribution. Recognition of consumers as actors then becomes a vital ingredient in any planning policy for FSDSs, with knowledge about consumers growing in importance inasmuch as urbanisation and demographic changes will have significant effects on both the quality and quantity of food demanded.
The emergence of urbanisation as a major issue for the next millennium, particularly in the context of trade liberalisation, shows how important it is to take account of the consumer in any FSDS development strategy. In French-speaking Africa this development is taking place in a political context of democratisation, in which the role of civil society is being increasingly recognised. The appearance of consumer groups is, therefore, a major social innovation that has to be considered in this field of study.
The main difficulty in taking account of consumers in analyses of FSDSs is that the wide range of situations - both objective (social and economic categories) and subjective (perception, food preferences, level of awareness of rights, etc.) - means that the concept of consumer is far from precise. A global analytical framework is needed in order to overcome this difficulty, taking into account the following:
Apart from consumers’ intrinsic features, various types of shopping behaviour have a more direct effect on supply and distribution systems. Consumers’ decisions are a result of their environment, income and living conditions, but these economic determinants cannot be isolated from their cultural heritage and set values.
Examination of the available material on food supply policies for African cities shows that although centralised planning has been abandoned in formulating agricultural policies in all the French-speaking countries of Africa, the need to focus production on consumers’ needs is still marginalised. Very few studies have been devoted to consumers, and very little attention given to consumers in documents redefining policies. The very few studies looking at shortcomings of food supply systems tend to focus on demand (quantity, price and quality) and the training needs of agents and seldom on relations between consumer behaviour and distribution systems.
A review of existing literature shows that researchers in management faculties at African universities have only recently started to undertake studies focusing on consumers, although these are essentially marketing studies and tend to concentrate on manufactured goods.[1] Studies carried out in the framework of research programmes by external bodies (like CIRAD, Louvain and FAO) provide some useful information on consumers but their primary focus is usually on distribution and supply networks.[2] Even though surveys conducted by consumer associations provide important data on consumers’ shopping behaviour, the objectives for which they are undertaken (usually to back demands) and significant methodological problems often limit their utility.
This study attempts to amalgamate available information on the behaviour of urban consumers’ in French-speaking Africa with a view to developing an analytical framework that facilitates better integration of the interests of consumers in programmes to improve FSDSs. It is based essentially on information from secondary sources and brief surveys of resource people (university lecturers and heads of consumer associations in Dakar).
