Africa: should we aim for food self-sufficiency?

A significant portion of the African population is at risk of food insufficiency. Will the continent's economic development enable it to meet this challenge?

Inflation, conflicts, climate change... For all these reasons, food insecurity in Africa is making headlines again: in early January 2023, the UN warned in particular about the increase in "serious" food insecurity in the Sahel.

For thirty years, it is poverty, more than the production deficit, which has been highlighted as the root cause of food insecurity. But with a African population which could almost double by 2050, the issue of supply, and therefore of local food production, is once again becoming a priority.

Food insecurity on the rise in Africa

The definition of food insecurity has evolved over the past decades to better take into account its manifestations and immediate causes.

Undernourishment, the most significant indicator of food insecurity, is characterized by poor average access to food healthy, nutritive et sufficient. She touched 278 million Africans in 2021, i.e. a third of the people concerned worldwide. Asia currently accounts for half of it; but in 2030, undernourishment is expected to affect as many Africans as Asians.

In addition, indicators of moderate and severe food insecurity have been established from household surveys in order to detect periods of food restriction or deprivation that could even endanger people's health. Moderate insecurity is manifested by skipped meals or reduced intake, while severe insecurity is manifested by entire days without eating.

Africa is the region of the world where not only the prevalence of global food insecurity is the highest (58% of the population fears not being able, or cannot, to eat every day), but also where the proportion of people in a situation of serious insecurity is the highest.

In total, 322 million Africans are affected by severe food insecurity and an additional 473 million by moderate forms, for a population of more than 1,2 billion people on the continent. Without forgetting that Africa concentrates seven of the eight countries where more than 80% of the inhabitants are in a situation of moderate or severe food insecurity.

Poverty highlighted

The main cause of undernourishment is, in Africa as in the rest of the world, poverty. Poor households who buy their food, especially in cities, have to face the cost of food particularly high.

Healthy food in Africa, which costs $3,46 per person per day, was in average more expensive than North America and Europe, where the average expenditure was equivalent to 3,19 dollars in 2020. At the same time, the rural population, still the majority in Africa, has few means (land, water, inputs) allowing them to produce enough food until the next harvest. .

Logically, therefore, it was thanks to the strong economic growth recorded during the decade before 2015 that food security had been able to improve. It has been accompanied, in some cases, by a marked improvement in malnutrition indicators, particularly with regard to growth retardation in children under 5 or child wasting. This progress is due to more effective policies targeting vulnerable families and breastfeeding women.

A generally modest food addiction

The idea that food insecurity in Africa is linked to difficulties in accessing foodstuffs (lack of sufficient income) more than to the lack of availability of food is well anchored.

However, another fragility enters the equation: food dependence, ie the proportion of imported food goods compared to all those consumed. Overall, it remains modest, since the share of the national food supply derived from imports is only 16% on average on the continent (compared to 13% globally). But these figures hide inequalities within the continent. Thus, in half of the countries, dependence on cereal imports is over 40% (30% on average). This dependence is even more marked in countries such as Algeria, Congo, Gabon, Botswana and Lesotho, which are more than 70% dependent on cereal imports (conversely, others, such as those of Sahel, have a dependency of less than 10%).

However, the analysis of large data shows that the more a country is dependent on the outside for its food, the more the food insecurity indicators are sensitive to the macroeconomic deterioration linked to international trade. This places these countries in a situation of vulnerability in the event of an economic shock, particularly in international and intra-African markets, as was the case in 2022 with the Russian-Ukrainian war.

Consequently, the prospects for demographic growth in Africa and therefore for an increase in the demand for food coupled with consequences of climate change on its agriculture, bring the question of the food supply and food autonomy of Africans back to the fore.

Growing food demand

By 2050, 60% of the increase in world population will occur in Africa, and this continent will be the only one whose rural population will have continued to grow (+ 35%). Africa will have to satisfy a demand for food which will be more than 160% to what it is today.

The search for food autonomy is therefore essential to food security in Africa as a strategy for reducing external dependence, creating wealth for the rural poor – those most vulnerable to food insecurity – and creating income. jobs (necessary in the short term, especially in the countryside).

The dilemma of sustainable food security

The growth of food production is essential, but with a constraint: if we want to avoid the expansion of crops on new lands, in particular to the detriment of forests, this growth must be achieved by favoring the increase in yields. This amounts to moving away from the trajectory followed since independence, largely based on extension of cultivated areas.

The room for maneuver is narrow, since different realistic scenarios project additional land needs for Africa ranging from a hundred to more than 500 million hectares – and this, with assumptions often modest levels of climate change and its impact on yields.

If we were to limit ourselves to cultivating the areas currently cultivated (excluding grassland), we should increase food imports eightfold in sub-Saharan Africa. Other studies show that to maintain the level of self-sufficiency, it would be necessary not only to close the yield gap between the existing and the potential, but also to multiply the number of harvests on the same surface, which requires much more extensive irrigation.

Investing in the development of agricultural productivity

A compromise remains to be found, but the rise in yields remains unavoidable. In this logic, support for agriculture by improving the productivity of the land would have a triple virtue: limiting the environmental impact of this growth, fighting against dependence on international markets, but also fighting against poverty and therefore improve food security. Supporting agriculture in Africa would be twice as efficient than to implement policies aimed at increasing productivity in the industrial sector to fight against poverty.

The revival of agricultural supply – which would benefit farmers, who are also the poorest – and the search for greater food independence will therefore once again become priority subjects in the years to come.

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This article was co-written with Bio Goura Soulé (Institute for Research and Application of Development Methods/ECOWAS). For a more detailed analysis of these issues, read The African Economy 2023, published by La Découverte in January 2023.

Benoit Faivre-Dupaigre, Researcher, Department of Economic Diagnostics and Public Policies, French Development Agency (AFD)

This article is republished from The Conversation under Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.