Kigali, Rwanda / Nouakchott, Mauritania

A new FAO methodology launched on 4 September 2026 at the Africa Food Systems Forum (AFSF) in Kigali shows that Mauritania has, for over a decade, been spending far more on the food system than its official agriculture budget captures — driven largely by investment in urban water infrastructure and coastal and marine conservation.

Mauritania is one of two pilot countries — alongside Uganda — used to test the Agrifood Systems Public Expenditure Analysis (ASPEA), a new FAO classification framework developed with the European Union that widens public expenditure tracking beyond agriculture to the full agrifood system. The pilot analysed Mauritanian public spending between 2009 and 2022.

What the conventional agriculture budget shows

Using FAO’s existing Monitoring and Analysing Food and Agricultural Policies (MAFAP) methodology, Mauritania spent MRU 70 billion (about USD 1.9 billion) on food and agriculture between 2009 and 2022 in nominal terms — MRU 55 billion in real terms. Including broader agriculture-supportive spending, the total rises to MRU 110 billion (USD 3.0 billion) nominal, or MRU 86 billion in real terms, over the same period.

Annual agriculture-specific spending grew steeply, from MRU 1.0 billion (USD 0.04 billion) in 2009 to MRU 9.0 billion (USD 0.24 billion) in 2022. As a share of total public spending, food and agriculture peaked at 12 percent in 2012 — likely reflecting renewed political attention and a 2011–2012 drought that drove up food aid and input subsidies — before settling at 10 percent by 2022.

Almost a third of agriculture-specific spending over the period went to transfers to agents: food aid alone made up 18 percent of the total, cash transfers 4.0 percent, and input subsidies for producers 9.0 percent. Agricultural infrastructure, mostly irrigation, took 26 percent, while only 8.0 percent went to agricultural research, extension and training. By sector, crops absorbed over 70 percent of agriculture-specific spending, against roughly 15 percent for fisheries and 14 percent for livestock — a split the report’s authors describe as disproportionate given fisheries’ and livestock’s importance to Mauritania’s economy.

What changes when the lens widens

Applying ASPEA, Mauritania’s total agrifood systems spending between 2009 and 2022 reached approximately MRU 103 billion in real terms, or about USD 3.6 billion — equivalent to 17.3 percent of total public spending and 3.9 percent of GDP on average over the period. Of that MRU 103 billion, MRU 55 billion was agriculture-specific spending, MRU 32 billion was agriculture-supportive spending, and a further MRU 16 billion came from the expanded agrifood systems categories that ASPEA newly captures.

In most years, the conventional MAFAP perimeter still accounted for at least 75 percent of total agrifood systems spending, exceeding 90 percent in 2013, 2014 and 2022. The main exception was 2010, when a sharp rise in urban water and sanitation spending temporarily shrank the MAFAP share relative to the newly-counted categories.

Where the extra money is going

Urban water and sanitation consistently accounted for the largest share of the spending ASPEA newly captures, mainly through expanding and upgrading potable water networks in Nouakchott and other urban centres, along with water-quality monitoring investment by the Water Quality Control Directorate. Water use in Mauritania is overwhelmingly agricultural — about 90 percent of total use, against 7 percent domestic and 3 percent industrial — which is part of why water infrastructure spending sits inside the agrifood systems perimeter.

The environmental domain has grown into the other major driver, with spending on national parks, coastal and marine areas, and nature protection and restoration rising from 11 percent of the newly-captured agrifood systems spending in 2009 to 78 percent in 2022 — much of it tied to marine and coastal biodiversity conservation programmes covering the Banc d’Arguin and Diawling national parks, alongside a UNDP-financed programme integrating environmental sustainability into poverty-reduction planning.

Nutrition programming, run by Mauritania’s Ministry of Social Affairs, Childhood and Family through community nutrition centres and trained community nutrition agents, averaged just 1.2 percent of the newly-captured spending across the full period — but rose sharply to 6.7 percent in 2021 and 8.8 percent in 2022. Police and prisons food procurement accounted for a further 4.5 percent on average, and agrifood knowledge generation and transfer — chiefly food and hospitality programmes at the University of Nouakchott — averaged 1.4 percent, climbing to 6 percent in 2022 alone.

Why this matters for policy

Mauritania’s pilot is the clearest illustration in the ASPEA methodology of how much conservation and water infrastructure spending sits just outside a conventional agriculture budget, despite being directly tied to the food system’s sustainability — particularly for a country where fisheries and coastal resources are central to food security and livelihoods.

The ASPEA methodology was launched at a side event of AFSF 2026 in Kigali, where FAO Deputy Regional Representative for Africa Meshack Malo called on member states, the African Union, regional economic communities, development partners and research organisations to work with FAO to scale the framework’s use across the continent as countries domesticate the 2025 Kampala Declaration commitment to allocate at least 10 percent of public expenditure to agrifood systems.

Source: Agrifood Systems Public Expenditure Analysis – Methodology and classification framework, FAO, 2026