Agricultural policy is a critical tool for governments to shape the development, productivity, and sustainability of the agricultural sector. Policies are formulated with specific goals such as ensuring food security, stabilizing prices, promoting rural employment, encouraging sustainable farming practices, and increasing farmers’ income. However, despite well-intended frameworks, policies sometimes fail to achieve their objectives, resulting in economic inefficiencies, social disparities, and environmental challenges. Understanding the meaning and contexts of policy failure in agriculture requires a detailed examination of both theoretical and practical dimensions of policy-making, implementation, and evaluation. Policy failure in agriculture can be defined as the inability of a policy to achieve its stated objectives or to produce unintended negative outcomes despite proper implementation. It is important to recognize that policy failure is not merely a result of poor execution; it can also stem from flawed policy design, lack of stakeholder engagement, or misalignment with ground realities. In the agricultural context, failures can manifest in multiple forms, including insufficient productivity growth, income inequality among farmers, environmental degradation, resource mismanagement, and market distortions. Policy failures are particularly critical in agriculture due to the sector’s direct link to national food security, rural livelihoods, and overall economic stability. One of the main contexts of agricultural policy failure is inadequate policy formulation. Many agricultural policies are based on generalized assumptions that fail to account for the diversity of agro-climatic zones, farm sizes, and socio-economic conditions of farmers. For example, subsidy schemes designed to promote high-yielding varieties may disproportionately benefit larger farmers with better access to irrigation, credit, and markets, leaving smallholders