Africa at the Crossroads: Feeding ourselves before it’s too late

Yet the reality is sobering. The maize for ugali, the wheat for bread, the rice that fills dinner plates, and even the cooking oil in almost every kitchen do not predominantly come from African farms.

They arrive by ship at the ports across the African continent, by truck across borders, or in bags and bottles stamped with foreign labels.

This is not a temporary stopgap; it is a structural feature of the African food system. Year after year, countries rely heavily on imports to feed their people.

The contradiction is glaring. Africa has built an economy rooted in farming, but it cannot reliably nourish its citizens.

War, sanctions, exchange rate shocks, or climate disasters disrupt those imports, with immediate consequences for every household.

The danger is not theoretical. It is already here, visible in the markets where prices rise with every tremor in the global supply chain. War in far-flung Ukraine shook the entire continent.

This dependency is not an accident. It has been shaped over decades by policy choices, market incentives, and social patterns that have gradually led agriculture in the wrong direction.

From colonial times, the system was biased toward export crops—tea, coffee, flowers, and avocados.

These earned foreign exchange, and so they were rewarded with research, infrastructure, and government support.

Staples like maize and rice were left behind. That bias persisted after independence, as exports continued to dominate the agenda despite the continent’s stagnant staple food productivity.

At the same time, donors and NGOs framed farming around household subsistence in most countries.

Their programs encouraged families to grow enough for their own survival, but this model was already outdated by the time urbanisation began to grow rapidly.

Feeding individual households was never going to be sufficient when cities across the continent began to swell with young people who depended entirely on food markets.

Today, the average age of an African farmer is rising.

In some countries, such as Kenya, the average age is sixty-one years old, as young people steadily migrate to urban centers, leaving an ageing rural population to shoulder the task of growing food.

Land tenure practices deepened the problem. Inheritance steadily fragmented farms over generations, shrinking once-viable holdings into half-acre plots.

These are too small to support investment in mechanisation or irrigation. A farmer in such conditions could only manage survival, not productivity.

In other parts of the world, such as the Netherlands, the second-largest food exporter in the world, land consolidation has allowed farms to remain large enough to invest in modern technology.

In African countries, the opposite occurred: holdings became too small to sustain the services farmers desperately needed.

Due to this fragmentation, entire service markets failed to establish a foothold.

Tractor operators cannot make a living tilling a quarter-acre farm. Irrigation projects often collapse under the weight of coordinating among dozens of small landowners.

Storage facilities, silos, and dryers sit empty because no single farmer produces enough to fill them.

Even seed and input suppliers hesitate to venture into regions where the scale is too small to sustain their businesses.

Policy failures compounded the crisis. Well-connected actors who profit from volatility have long controlled agricultural policy.

Import bans, sudden tariff changes, and emergency permits have served a few insiders while destabilising the entire system.

For farmers, this meant that one year they might be encouraged to plant more, only to see prices collapse under a flood of cheap imports the next.

Under such conditions, long-term investment in staple crops made no sense. Many farmers responded rationally: they retreated into subsistence, producing only for their families.

The result is a system in which imports no longer supplement production; instead, they define it.

Many African countries now bring in millions of tonnes of maize, wheat, and rice every year. Local prices fluctuate in response to global supply and shipping costs.

When wheat prices spike in the Black Sea region, bread prices in Nairobi or Lagos rise within weeks.

When India or Vietnam bans rice exports, shelves in Kenyan supermarkets go bare almost immediately, showing how easily foreign governments’ domestic decisions can destabilise Kenyan households.

Imports are priced in dollars, so every depreciation of the local currency raises the cost of food regardless of how well African farmers have harvested.

Climate disruptions reduce global surpluses just as local farmers struggle with erratic weather. And with rapid urbanisation, more Africans are entirely dependent on purchased food.

For city dwellers, a disruption in imports translates directly into hunger and unrest.

This is the essence of the danger: Africa’s food security is not anchored in its farms but in global trade flows, foreign governments, currency markets, and shipping routes. In an unstable world, this is not resilience.

It is recklessness. Africa has the largest landmass of any continent after Asia; the contradiction becomes even more striking.

With vast arable landscapes stretching from the Sahel to the Great Rift Valley, the potential for self-sufficiency is immense.

However, fragmentation, antiquated policies, and underinvestment continue to hinder much of the continent’s agricultural potential, despite its abundance.

This unrealised potential makes the reliance on food imports not only risky but also deeply paradoxical for a region so richly endowed with fertile soil and a favourable climate.

And yet the system survives because it benefits a small group. Import cartels and politically connected traders profit handsomely from instability.

Export-oriented elites enjoy foreign exchange revenues. The costs are borne by farmers who cannot plan, by consumers who pay more, and by a nation whose security is compromised.

Without a deliberate effort to challenge this imbalance, the cycle will remain unbroken.

But the cycle can be broken. It requires deliberate, systemic change that prioritises food security as national security.

Staple crops must be treated with the same seriousness as export crops, receiving the necessary investment in research, infrastructure, and market support.

Farms must be scaled up not by dispossessing smallholders but through creative models such as land pooling, cooperative leases, and shared farming blocks that restore holdings to a size that supports mechanisation.

Service markets must be rebuilt—not as scattered pilot projects, but as viable businesses located near clusters of production.

Policy must be stabilised through transparent, rules-based frameworks so that farmers and investors can plan with confidence.

To sustain services such as tractors and irrigation kits, financing must shift from land-based collateral to cash-flow-based lending.

Processing facilities must be anchored near farms to stabilise demand and provide reliable markets for farmers.

And strategic grain reserves must be rebuilt and managed transparently as insurance against the shocks that are no longer rare but inevitable.

The principle is straightforward: Africa must first feed itself. Export earnings without food security are fragile wealth. Local production, without productivity, is a fragile survival. Only by striking a balance between both can Africa stand on firm ground.

The urgency could not be greater. Africa is one global shock away from empty shelves.

Each recent crisis—wheat from Ukraine, rice from India, palm oil from Indonesia—has already exposed how vulnerable we are.

Each time, households pay more, farmers face uncertainty, and governments scramble for emergency imports. And each time, little changes.

We cannot continue farming without feeding ourselves, importing what we should produce, and pretending volatility is normal.

Land fragmentation, policy capture, and underinvestment will not fix themselves.

The choice is stark. Either each country restructures its agricultural system now—pooling land, building service markets, stabilising policies, and anchoring processing close to farms—or it will stumble into hunger, inflation, and instability when the next shock arrives.

We must decide: will agriculture remain our greatest strength, or will it harden into our greatest vulnerability?

The answer will be determined by the choices made in the next few years. The time to act is now, before the next crisis dictates our actions.

The article was co-authored by Liesbeth Bakker of CASBI – Centre for Applied Sciences & Business Innovation.