2023-04-20 17:50:00
Iinflation, conflicts, climate change… For all these reasons, food insecurity in Africa is making headlines again: in early January 2023, the UN warned in particular of 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 an African population that could almost double by 2050, the question of supply, and therefore of local food production, is once again becoming a priority.
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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 striking indicator of food insecurity, is characterized by poor average access to healthy, nutritious and sufficient food. It affected 278 million Africans in 2021, i.e. a third of the people concerned worldwide. Asia currently accounts for half of this, 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 restriction or deprivation of food that go so far as to jeopardize 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.
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Poverty highlighted
The main cause of undernourishment is, in Africa as in the rest of the world, poverty. Poor households who buy their own food, especially in cities, face particularly high food costs.
Healthy food in Africa, which costs $3.46 per person per day, was on average more expensive than in North America and Europe, where the average expenditure was equivalent to $3.19 in 2020. At the same time, the rural population, still the majority in Africa, has few means (land, water, inputs) enabling it 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 stunting of children under 5 or wasting of children. This progress is due to more effective policies targeting vulnerable families and breastfeeding women.
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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 coming 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 population growth in Africa and therefore an increase in demand for food, coupled with the consequences of climate change on its agriculture, bring the question of food supply and food autonomy for Africans back to the fore. .READ ALSO Africa is reclaiming its food sovereignty
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 meet a demand for food that will be more than 160% higher than 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).
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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 the extension of cultivated areas.
The room for maneuver is narrow, since different realistic scenarios project additional land requirements for Africa ranging from a hundred to more than 500 million hectares – and this, with often modest assumptions of climate change and its impact on yields.
If we were to limit ourselves to cultivating the areas currently cultivated (excluding grassland), we would have to multiply by eight food imports in sub-Saharan Africa. Other studies show that to maintain the level of self-sufficiency, it would be necessary not only to fill the gap in yield between the existing and the potential, but also to multiply the number of harvests on the same surface, which imposes to irrigate a lot wider.
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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 effective as implementing policies to increase productivity in the industrial sector to fight 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.
* Benoît Faivre-Dupaigre is in charge of research, economic diagnostics and public policies department, within the French Development Agency (AFD). 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 2023published by La Découverte in January 2023.
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