Wheat and sorghum food policy in Sudan

Abstract EN

Wheat and sorghum crops have prominent roles in the Sudan agricultural sector as important sources of food security and farm income.

They are the main staple food crops in the Sudan.

In the face of increasing world food prices during the 2000s, the country was obliged to abandon liberalization policies partially for food main crops and to subsidize wheat consumers in order to improve their accessibility to food and fix price ceilings for farmers as an incentive to increase food availability.

The aim of this paper is to assess and quantify the consequences of domestic price policy of the two main food crops, wheat and sorghum on the food security of the country.

This study applies a multi-market model approach to analyze Sudan's food security policies.

The model is static and assumes perfect competitive crop markets and homogeneity of goods.

It allows the study of interaction between commodity markets through own and cross price elasticities.

The model involves major food security crop markets in Sudan, namely wheat and sorghum and extends to provide analysis of national food security indicators of food self-sufficiency and per capita consumption ratios to provide an overview of national food policy implications under different policy scenarios.

The model also runs welfare analysis about the distributional impact of the adopted price policies.

The simulation results reveal that the total effect of subsidizing both wheat producers and consumers, while taxing sorghum producers' show in general a small positive change in the supply of wheat and a decrease in sorghum supply.

On the demand side, wheat demand would considerably increase induced by the subsidized consumer prices.

The subsidy policy would result in an increase in wheat consumption and consequently wheat imports which will aggravate the deficit in the balance of trade.

The current policy reduces the self–sufficiency ratio while increases per capita consumption of cereals in the country.

The paper concludes that the government policy should manage carefully the intervention in wheat and sorghum markets in terms of subsidies and taxes which would distort prices and result in welfare losses and inefficient resource allocation.

The policy need to consider the developments in the world market prices and adopt flexible subsidy polic