Africa’s food crisis needs innovative funding — UN official

The SOFI report — produced jointly by UN agencies including IFAD, the World Food Program and the World Health Organization — highlights the continued impact of supply chain shocks caused by the war in Ukraine and COVID-19 pandemic.

Lario said African countries should diversify their crops, to reduce the reliance on those that are imported, and produce more fertilizers locally. “There needs to be a certain degree of self reliance if you do not want to have this type of short term shocks that are very difficult to overcome,” he said.

Issues around food security are of paramount importance across Africa. So much of the political, economic, and social upheavals we’ve seen in recent years on the continent are tied in some way to this issue.

On the face of it, Kenya’s mass protests were sparked by unpopular tax hikes. But those plans came amid a high cost of living, driven by food inflation. And Kenya isn’t an isolated case, high food inflation in recent years has also driven discontent in other African countries, such as Nigeria and Ghana.

Those prices have been tied to a lack of access to nutritious food, which stems from global supply chain shocks. The solution to this food insecurity lies in addressing a variety of issues that go beyond models to boost private sector investment in agriculture. That is, of course, important, but so too is improving security to dampen the impact of conflict on food production. Farmers in Mali and northern Nigeria, for example, have been forced to leave their land when fleeing Islamist insurgents. Such insurgencies, which have destabilized countries around the Sahel, prevent crops going to markets and, in extreme cases, cut off entire rural areas.

Better transport infrastructure, through road and rail, would help the transportation of food around countries and better implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area would make it easier for countries to transport food across borders. That would be achievable through administrative changes, such as the implementation of continent wide agencies for food standards to ease the movement of goods and remove the bottlenecks caused by different countries each having their own rules and regulations.

Ndidi Nwuneli, CEO of the One Campaign, a non-profit which advocates for ending extreme poverty, told Semafor Africa the causes of food insecurity across Africa lay primarily in the continent being hit disproportionately hard by the global climate crisis. She said the problems caused by floods and droughts faced by African countries were exacerbated by the pandemic and the debt burden faced by many of the continent’s governments.

Nwuneli said countries became more insular and protectionist in response to supply chain constraints caused by the pandemic and many African countries are “prioritizing debt repayments” over investments in climate adaptation.

She said solutions to the food crisis seen in a number of African countries required a focus on climate change adaptation such as “debt forgiveness linked to climate change and debt swaps linked to climate and food security,” She said there were “lots of creative opportunities” when it comes to debt investment interventions.