Africa's Food Crisis Rooted in Trade Walls; Farmers, Consumers Pay the Price

KIGALI, Rwanda. Farmers across Africa cannot find buyers for their harvests, processors run below capacity, and ordinary consumers pay inflated, unpredictable prices for food. These are not isolated problems. They are symptoms of a continent whose food systems remain fractured along national borders, even as Africa produces agricultural surpluses large enough to feed its own people and generate export revenue.

Nardos Bekele-Thomas, Director-General of the African Union Development Agency-NEPAD, put the paradox plainly at the Africa Food Systems Forum summit in Kigali. Surplus food grown in one region routinely fails to reach areas facing food deficits, while Africa continues to import large volumes of food from outside the continent altogether.

“Farmers struggle to access markets. Processors operate below capacity and consumers are confronted with high and volatile food prices,” Bekele-Thomas said, describing the daily reality facing African citizens and food producers.

The African Continental Free Trade Area, known as AfCFTA, offers a framework to dismantle these barriers. But Bekele-Thomas was direct: implementation must move beyond policy statements to tangible results. The true measure of success, she emphasized, is whether African agricultural products actually flow more freely across borders and reach the consumers and markets that need them.

Her proposed remedy is practical. Food corridors would link agricultural production zones directly to processing centers and high-demand or deficit markets, creating supply chains that reduce post-harvest losses, transport costs and transaction expenses. Such infrastructure could shift agriculture from subsistence farming into a competitive source of jobs and enterprise, while building resilience against climate shocks and global market disruptions.

“Food corridors have the potential to transform agriculture from a largely subsistence activity into a competitive source of enterprise, job creation and, of course, exports,” she said.

Physical infrastructure alone will not be enough. African countries must develop interoperable customs systems, invest substantially in transport and logistics, and secure development finance to move food efficiently across borders. The challenge cannot be solved by individual nations working in isolation. Production may be competitive in one country, processing capacity located in another, and the strongest market opportunity found in a third.

“Our policy and investment responses must therefore reflect the continental nature of the value chains that we are seeking,” Bekele-Thomas said.

By contrast, the countries that have made progress show what coordinated action can achieve. Bekele-Thomas acknowledged Rwanda’s efforts to advance the AfCFTA agricultural trade agenda, particularly its work to prioritize agricultural value chains and attract investment into competitive continental operations. Even so, she stressed that the focus must now shift decisively from commitment to action.

She called for mobilized investment toward commercially viable food corridors and for removal of the constraints that prevent them from reaching scale. Stronger collaboration is needed among governments, the private sector, development finance institutions, smallholder farmers and large-scale producers. Critically, both tariff and non-tariff barriers must come down, and value addition must increase within Africa itself.

“We must increase value addition as a matter of priority and ensure that we eliminate all intra-African barriers to trade, whether they are tariff barriers or non-tariff barriers,” she said.

Her remarks reflect a broader shift among African governments and development partners toward transforming fragmented national food systems into integrated regional and continental value chains. Food corridors, Bekele-Thomas argued, provide the practical mechanism for connecting priority agricultural value chains to regional markets, investment and trade. The citizens who depend on affordable, reliable food supplies have the most to gain. Whether the investment and political will required to build those corridors materializes quickly enough is the question that now hangs over the AfCFTA process.