20. Anyone with a pencil and paper and half an hour to spare can quickly draw up a list of 40 or 50 important policy issues in African livestock development, and, with further time, can add to it daily. Do we need to pick out from such lists the "critical" issues?
21. The answer is: yes, we do. Policy-making - like almost every other human activity - consumes resources which are in scarce supply. There are three principal scarce resources involved: firstly, the time of the key decision makers who, if they are to make good Policies, must have adequate opportunity to discuss and reflect on the issues involved before they decide them. The second principal resource is political impetus. Once an appropriate policy is decided on it usually needs a great deal of effort to convert it from an idea into the legislation, organisation and budget necessary for it to become a reality. This, particularly with controversial issues, requires that those who are promoting the policy lobby intensely for it and use every piece of political influence, goodwill and support they can muster to push it through. Again, such political influence is a finite resource which must not be squandered. The third important resource is the skill of the policy analysts who should be involved in researching policy issues before decisions are taken. Such skills are in particularly short supply in Africa.
22. The process of making good policies, therefore, consumes scarce resources. If these resources are used up in the process of making policies of lower priority, they will not be available for dealing with the really critical policy issues. Each country needs to concentrate its attention and policymaking resources where the benefits from doing so are highest.
23. But how, in practice, are we to select these priorities? There are two issues involved. Firstly, by what criteria should we compare the potential benefits of tackling particular policy issues; that is another way of saying how do we decide on their intrinsic importance. Secondly, how are we to predict in advance either how much of the scarce resources a particular piece of policy-making will consume or how much "benefits", in terms of these criteria, it will yield? Clearly the situation will differ from country to country, depending partly on how good or bad their existing policies are and partly on a variety of natural, social or economic factors. For example, with respect to criteria, in some countries the overall balance between production and consumption of livestock commodities is satisfactory but a serious emerging problem is the declining welfare of a particular large group of livestock owners, e.g. nomadic pastoralists. In these countries governments are likely to judge that the proper criterion for concentrating on particular policy issues is their relevance to this specific welfare problem. In other countries consumption of livestock commodities is rising rapidly but production is stagnant, with the result that imports of these commodities are growing fast and preempting foreign exchange urgently needed for other purposes. In these countries policy issues relevant to the rapid expansion of output are likely to be regarded by governments as of the highest importance.
24. Explicit in this way of describing importance is the assumption that it is importance as judged by the government of the country concerned that matters. Implicit is the assumption that governments have some kind of political or bureaucratic mechanism whereby a single "government viewpoint" can be distilled from a variety of conflicting views of different individuals or groups within the government. Neither of these assumptions is unchallengeable but they are not issues which can be pursued here.
25. In evaluating intrinsic importance the criteria are specific to each country. The experience of other countries, however, can be most useful in alerting us to patterns of developments which are likely to occur, thereby enabling us to diagnose at an early stage an emerging problem which might not otherwise be diagnosed until it had reached crisis proportions.
26. Comparison of the experience of different countries could also help us to predict the likely resource-costs and benefits of particular pieces of policy-making, but so far there have not been enough studies of livestock policy carried out, either in depth, i.e. of particular countries over long periods in time, or in breadth, i.e. comparing the experience of many different countries, to provide us yet with much objective guidance.2
2
ILCA's Livestock Policy Unit is currently engaged in a number of studies, comparing experience in different countries, which it is hoped will throw light on this. Raikes (1981) provides some in-depth information in respect of three countries in East Africa.
27. Here at ILCA we have already made some efforts to do cross-country analysis to see whether data already collected and published by other organisations enable us to identify, over a wide range of policies, associations between particular sorts of policies and growth in livestock output in a way that would enable us to pinpoint the key policy issues. We looked, for example, at the scale of government expenditures on veterinary services and research and at input marketing systems; but we were unable to find significant relations with these variables (McClintock, 1984). However, the data we had to use were unsatisfactory in a variety of ways and we are now engaged in collecting more reliable and relevant data. In the meantime, in the absence of objective analysis, we all, as individuals, have to rely on subjective hunch to identify those policy issues where concentration of effort in policy analysis and policymaking will yield the highest returns.
