Shaping agri-food policy (in)coherence at intersecting crises: a case study of EU foreign policymaking for food security in the Sahel

Over a decade ago war broke off in Mali, and since then it spread throughout the Sahel – escalating prolonged and intersecting humanitarian, development, and security crises. The European Union (EU) adopted different policies to comprehensively respond to such crises, but their strategies still result in schizophrenic agendas and incoherent policies. Failing to tackle either of the intersecting crises, the conflict has been expanding – putting into question the EU’s foreign policies (among other international actors). As a result, food insecurity, which lies at the juncture of intersecting crises, has worsened despite international interventions. In this paper, we address the following research question: how and why has the European Union failed to coherently respond to intersecting crises in the Sahel, particularly food security? Scholars from different fields of study focus on different dimensions of this question – offering partial yet complementary understandings of agri-food policies in the context of intersecting crises. EU studies, on the one hand, identified several institutional and operational factors affecting the (mal)functioning of EU foreign policies: EU policymaking is fragmented and compartmentalized, and EU actors (too) often do not coordinate or lack collective action. On the other hand, development, humanitarian and conflict studies refer to the EU as one global actor speaking with single voice, explaining inconsistencies in EU foreign policies through its self-serving incentive structures, its internal politics or its neocolonial and neoliberal power. These two bodies of literature offer various analytical tools and theories that help us understand how foreign agri-food policies fail to deliver food security in a context of intersecting crises. However, a comprehensive, multilayered and longitudinal analysis of EU foreign food policies still evades. This paper builds on these two complementary bodies of literature and integrates them by applying their theories and analytical tools to the case study of EU foreign policies for food security in the Sahel. In particular, we will focus on the EU agri-food policies that emerged from the last two integrated (2011) and comprehensive (2021) strategies for the Sahel – which supposedly address the intersecting humanitarian, development and security crises. We elaborate a process-tracing of agri-food policies, which we integrate with an analysis of the evolving EU institutional structures and policy narratives. We do so by analyzing our original qualitative data and available policy documents: we conducted interviews with EU policy officers at the headquarters in Brussels in 2023 (and upcoming fieldwork in spring 2024) and carried out narrative analysis of policy documents from various EU bodies competent on food security in the Sahel: the European External Action Services, the European Commission, the Euro-pean Parliament and the Council of the European Union. Through this case study of EU foreign agri-food policies, we show how policy objectives and strategies evolved in the past decade in the intersecting crises facing Sahelian agri-food systems. Finally, in the light of academic debates, we attempt a comprehensive explanation of the EU’s failure to coherently address food security in the Sahel.