It is a pity Africa is a net food importer

Currently, food has a place on the list of leading imports into the African continent. This must be such a lucrative prospect for international trade players out there, viewing the African market as a destination of their farm produce. The continent’s population is exploding and the capacity of the continent to feed her natives going into the future is not all impressive. The continent holds sixty percent of all cultivable land in the world. While it is estimated that irrigation could boost agricultural production for the continent by up to fifty percent, only about six percent of the cultivated land was under irrigation ten years ago.

However, the vastness of cultivable land on the continent cannot be viewed in isolation regarding food production potential. This is because the straight opening of land for agriculture normally comes with the destruction of forest cover, and under rudimentary farming which requires huge tracts of land per unit output, this can be a key driver of climate change problems to which the continent is already most exposed. This implies that boosting food production on the continent will not be cheap, because it will require a modern approach that ensures maximization of agricultural production per unit area of land. It will be somewhat capital intensive. Nevertheless, agriculture remains Africa’s low-hanging fruit, as business pundits would coin it. The continent has huge potential in this sector, and the market is assured and growing on home ground.

Aside from the science and technological needs to realize the above food production potential, we also face challenges that may be categorized as administrative.

Africa’s commercial farming model is largely still stuck in the 1960s.

Borrowing inference from recent statistics, Africa’s annual coffee exports stand at about $2billion. The continent’s tea exports are valued at about $1.45billion. West Africa supplies about seventy percent of all the cocoa in the world and earns less than $6billion for her toil.

On the other hand, Africa’s annual imports of wheat stand at about $10.6billion. Rice worth about $6.3billion is similarly imported into the continent every year. Maize imports stand at about $3.6billion.

The African commercial agriculture model is still prioritized around traditional cash crops of coffee, tea, cocoa, tobacco, and others. These were crops introduced in colonial times to feed markets in Europe and the new world. Even when a lucrative food market is flourishing on the continent and foreign exporters are reaping big from selling food to us, our commercial farming priorities are still firmly within the colonial mold. Needless to say, we can produce our food and save ourselves the above import burden. While I have no statistics about the cost of production attached to Africa’s long-established cash crop industry, I suspect the cost is not so small. There is no telling what impact a similar cost could make if it was directed to food production.

Low levels of intra-Africa trade

This factor is currently under the high priority of African leaders, to remove intra-Africa trade barriers. However, its challenges are still with us, and perhaps for a while. African Union records indicate that between 2004 and 2007, about eighty-eight percent of Africa’s total agricultural imports originated from outside the continent. This statistic is of course a bit old. More recently, intra-African exports were 16.6 percent of total exports in 2017, compared with 68.1 percent in Europe, 59.4 percent in Asia, and 55 percent in America. This should present a more recent indication of the levels of agricultural trade between Africa countries.

What this means is that if Uganda, which is itself a net food exporter, gets a bumper agricultural harvest, the possibility of selling off that food to Mozambique is constrained. The Ugandan farmer may instead suffer price declines in farm produce while Mozambique may at the same time be importing rice from Asia. It is actually not rare to find bananas in Ugandan plantations ripening for lack of buyers, and going to waste, while peer countries may be experiencing food supply difficulties. 

As such, part of the solution to the threat of food insecurity for Africa will require a reorientation of priorities in the agriculture sector to align with the home market for food on the continent, and ensuring the success of ongoing initiatives aimed at growing intra-Africa trade through trade integration. Some experts have pushed the argument that there is no cause for alarm since some African countries are net food exporters after all. This argument is faulty because a country that has the capacity to produce the food she needs should not be encouraged to remain a net food importer, especially when there is no reportable alternative opportunity that is being preferentially pursued to give a higher return than farming. Secondly, reliance on food imports from distant producers breeds a more risky dependence situation compared to what it would be if food was being imported from peer African countries.

Raymond is a Chartered Risk Analyst and risk management consultant

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