Assessing subsidy integration in the 40 years of agricultural planning in the Maldives

87% of agricultural subsidies are harmful to the environment and human health while contributing little to food security. The first step to addressing harmful subsidies is to identify and trace them in policies. Small Island Developing States (SIDS), such as the Maldives, are the most vulnerable to environmental degradation caused by activities they contribute minimally. In the case of subsidies, the relative contribution to the environmental degradation by islands and the relative impacts of subsidies on islands are not studied, leaving a void in the global knowledge pool. This paper addresses the first step of this gap by identifying and assessing the historical trends of subsidy integration in Maldivian agricultural policy by analyzing their temporal distribution patterns and the quality of subsidy inclusion in national plans in the past four decades. The framework adopted for this study is a multi-criteria scoring protocol and a classification of 15 subsidy types to deliver a quantitative overview of the status and trends in subsidy in the agriculture sector of the Maldives. The results showed that although the scale of agriculture in the country is limited, subsidies have consistently been an integral part of agricultural planning since 1985, with agricultural inputs being one of the most frequently and highly subsidized over the years. Twelve different subsidy types were traced in the ten assessed national plans, and eleven subsidy types were identified in the plan from 2019 to 2023. These results serve as a baseline for the understanding of subsidies in the Maldives by providing a narrative of an island state for the global overview of subsidies and for comparative studies thereof.