Page 39 - The Economist USA

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The Economist April 25th 2020
Food distribution
The race to feed Africa
GOMA AND KAMPALA
Covid-19 is straining Africa’s food systems, but need not break them
nce the market was closed, all my
“Oknowledge was over,” sighs Brian
Kayongo, a spare-parts trader from Kampa-
la, Uganda’s capital. Until the covid-19 lock- prices of their own commodities fall and
down he spent most of his time in the city.
He knew about spark plugs, not seeds. But
now he is planting maize and beans on a
patch of land he has rented in a nearby vil-
lage. Everybody there is digging, he says.
Even the young people who turned up their
noses at farming have “surrendered” to the
tyranny of the hoe.
Mr Kayongo is less worried about the vi-
rus than how to eat. And he is not alone.
The un’s World Food Programme (wfp)
warns that the number of people who are
“acutely hungry”, most of them in Africa,
could double this year. The World Bank
forecasts that agricultural production in
sub-Saharan Africa will fall by 3-7%, and
food imports by 13-25%, depending on how
freely trade flows. Yet there is plenty of
food in the world. If the pandemic creates
hunger, it will be policy failures, not crop
failures, that are mainly to blame.
The nightmare scenario would be a re-
peat of the food crisis in 2007-08, when the
world’s governments hoarded staple
grains, making prices soar. Africa imports
more than a quarter of its cereals. Much of
the rice that Ghana gobbles up comes from
Vietnam—which has restricted exports.
Shiploads of Indian rice bound for Senegal
and Benin have been stranded in grid-
locked ports. In normal times several west
African countries spend more than half
their export earnings buying food. As the
their currencies weaken, they will have
even less purchasing power than before.
Fortunately world food systems today
are “in a very different situation” from the
crisis of 2007-08, says David Laborde of the
International Food Policy Research Insti-
tute (ifpri), a think-tank in Washington.
Out of lunch
Children deprived of school meals by covid-19
April 2020, m 0 0.1 0.5 1 2 4 12
No data
Egypt 11.2m
Nigeria
9.8m
South Africa
Source: WFP 9.2m
Middle East & Africa 39
Back then export restrictions blocked
about 11% of the calories that flowed
through global markets. In the pandemic
similar measures have affected only 3% of
supplies. The oil price was rocketing in
2007; now traders cannot give it away.
World food stocks are high. Prices for rice
are up, but not to crisis levels. South Afri-
cans can partly shift consumption to
home-grown maize after a bumper crop,
says Ferdi Meyer of the Bureau for Food and
Agricultural Policy, a research group.
Instead, covid-19 is hitting people’s
pockets. In African cities the average
household allocates half its expenditure to
food. That budget has shrunk as economies
nosedive and lockdowns close the infor-
mal businesses in which most workers
hustle. The ifpri estimates that 80m more
Africans, mostly in cities, could see their
incomes drop below the equivalent of $1.90
a day (though its model does not account
for domestic stimulus packages).
Several governments have tried to help
by handing out food or regulating prices.
But there have been problems. In Uganda
four officials overseeing distribution were
arrested on suspicion of fraudulently in-
flating prices. In Kibera, a slum in Kenya’s
capital, Nairobi, women were trampled
and police fired tear-gas as thousands of
people jostled for a giveaway from well-
wishers. It would be simpler just to give
cash, which can be sent to people on their
mobile phones.
The other priority is to keep food mov-
ing. Only a fifth of the food in Africa is eat-
en by the families that grow it, calculate re-
searchers at Michigan State University. The
rest moves down long supply chains, via
lorries, processors and wholesale markets,
before trickling out through millions of in-
formal traders. Those with land can fall
back on their own crops for a time. But even
the poorest rural households buy nearly
half their food (by value). Many are only
part-time farmers, topping up their earn-
ings with transport, trade or wage labour.
Hastily devised lockdowns are clogging
up this system’s capillaries. Queues of lor-
ries have jammed border posts and some
local prices have spiked, perhaps because
of hoarding. Governments designate food
as an essential service, but security forces
still beat up street vendors. Nigerian police
have put up the bribes they extort from
drivers. The Kenyan force has shot market
traders. In Zimbabwe they have confiscat-
ed and burned produce, apparently to pun-
ish farmers for breaking a travel ban.
As lockdowns persist, food systems
have settled into new patterns. Some Nige-
rian markets open for four hours at a time,
on alternate days, to allow for cleaning in
between. In Uganda vendors sleep in their
stalls. Meanwhile, subtle disruptions have
appeared. A trader in Uganda says it has be-
come costlier to transport maize, because 1