The Food
Equation

The arithmetic is brutal. Africa holds 60% of the world’s uncultivated arable land. It has the youngest agricultural workforce on Earth. It receives more sunshine than any other continent. And it spends $65 billion a year importing food it could grow — a bill projected to reach $110 billion within the decade. The gap between what Africa produces and what it consumes is not a resource problem. It is the most expensive infrastructure failure on the planet.

The yield gap tells the story in one number. African rice yields average 2.2 tonnes per hectare. Asian yields are 4.7. North American yields are 8.5. The same crop, the same biology, four times the output. The difference is irrigation (6% of African farmland versus 40% in Asia), fertiliser (17 kg per hectare versus 135 kg globally), mechanisation, storage, roads, and extension services. Each missing input compounds the others. A farmer with better seed but no irrigation produces slightly more. A farmer with irrigation, seed, fertiliser, storage, and a road to market produces four times more.

Morocco is the proof. Plan Maroc Vert invested over $10 billion and increased agricultural output by 40%. The kingdom now exports $6.5 billion in agricultural products — berries to British supermarkets, tomatoes to Spanish tables, citrus across Europe. Drip irrigation transformed arid regions into export orchards. Morocco did not have better land than its neighbours. It had better policy.

The food import dependency creates a cascading vulnerability. When Russia invaded Ukraine, wheat prices spiked globally. Africa, which imports one-third of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine, faced immediate food security crises across dozens of countries. The dependency is not just economic — it is geopolitical. A continent that cannot feed itself cannot be sovereign. Every dollar spent importing food that could be grown locally is a dollar of national security leaked to the global market.

The $1 trillion agribusiness target by 2030 is not fantasy. The demand is guaranteed — the population is doubling, urbanisation is accelerating, diets are diversifying, and middle classes are growing. The question is whether that demand is met by African farmers or by importers. Food processing alone could generate millions of jobs — it already accounts for half of manufacturing employment in Nigeria and Niger. But less than 1% of African agricultural output is processed before export. The continent sells raw cocoa at $2,500 a tonne and buys back chocolate at $25,000 a tonne. The value-addition gap is where the money is.

The food equation has the same structure as every other Africa progression story: the resources exist, the demand exists, the potential is documented beyond dispute, and the gap between potential and reality is a function of investment, infrastructure, and policy. What Morocco has done with berries, what Kenya has done with horticulture, what Ethiopia was doing with coffee before conflict intervened — these are models, not exceptions. The equation balances when the investment arrives. It does not balance by itself.