Food is expensive – prices in African cities have generally been much higher than in other developing regions of the world COP27, being held in Egypt in November 2022, must prioritise development, investment and inclusion in healthy markets to reverse this trend.
While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused global food price increases, the food price hikes in many African countries, including in East Africa, have been much greater than the global increases. International maize prices increased by 40% to a high of just over US$360/t in March 2022. However, bulk maize prices in Kenya have more than doubled over the first half of the year to historic highs of well over $600/t by July 2022 and, on some measures, were over $700/t. This flowed through to prices of the main staple, maizemeal.
The extreme drought in the Horn of Africa and East Africa and the availability of imports is behind extreme food price spikes in these regions. However, Africa includes some of the best areas in the world to sustainably expand food production, including regions in East and Central Africa. The fact that African countries are reliant on imports, despite this potential, points to the need to analyse how agri- food value chains and markets are working in practice. We must assess market outcomes against the rapid, major and systemic economic changes required at the local, national and global levels to respond to the climate emergency.
The Russia–Ukraine war has impacted on fertiliser prices, which increased in the second half of 2021 on the back of spiking gas prices, anticipating the invasion. This has already had an effect on African farmers’ planting in 2022 with, for example, reductions in fertiliser-intensive maize in South Africa and Zambia and more soybeans being planted. It points to the need to ensure fair prices to farmers to cover higher costs and the need to move to regenerative farming methods not reliant on fertiliser. However, fertiliser use is already low in most African countries.
Food supply is estimated to account for around a third of greenhouse gas emissions. African countries, however, are responsible for negligible emissions and yet face urgent challenges of adaptation to global warming and extreme weather events which threaten production. Areas in the continent are climate ‘hotspots’ where temperatures are increasing above the global average and rainfall is projected to decline further.
A just transition must address the adaptation challenges of African countries while also moving food systems to a sustainable footing with lower emissions. These changes all work through market mechanisms, which are poorly understood. In addition, agri-food markets are highly concentrated at important levels from inputs through to trading and processing, which means that market outcomes are largely the result of the decisions of a small number of firms. We need to understand, and engage with, the firms that control these markets. What small and medium-scale farmers, who account for the great majority of important crops such as maize, get for their production depends on the costs of inputs and the prices they receive for their produce.
A guest editorial