4 min
A handful of trees per hectare in treeless farmland can increase atmospheric water capture five- to six-fold. Meanwhile, a healthy diet is unaffordable for around 80% of Africans, compared with a mere 1.2% in affluent nations. And for Europeans who hope to curb mass migration by investing in Africa, there is more sobering news: such investments may well have the opposite effect.
Africa is on the rise. Demographically, this century is poised to become the "African Century." While today Africa is home to 18% of the global population, by 2050 that figure is projected to have risen to 25%. The United Nations forecasts an increase from 1.41 billion to 2.47 billion people — more than one billion additional inhabitants. And the growth will continue after 2050. This brings significant challenges, notably in ensuring food security. Can Africa feed itself in the decades ahead?
These pressing questions are addressed in Pathways to African Food Security — Challenges, Threats and Opportunities towards 2050, a book published earlier this year. Edited by Wageningen University researchers Michiel de Haas and Ken Giller, it brings together 57 contributors — most of them Dutch, with twenty African scholars, four World Bank staff members and others. The disciplinary range is impressive: agronomists, economists, historians, a demographer, sociologists and four nutritionists. Their perspectives occasionally diverge, enriching the analysis.
The result is a multidisciplinary, lucidly written, and highly informative volume, brimming with well-supported, often surprising insights and conclusions. Complex problems are explained with clarity, avoiding the patronising simplifications that too often mar discussions about Africa. It is Wageningen at its finest.
Food Security
The opening chapter delivers an immediate jolt. Decades of progress in food security and child mortality plateaued around 2010. Since then, the number of undernourished Africans has risen from 159 million (15.1%) to 282 million (19.7%) by 2022. Slower declines in fertility rates, worsening soil degradation, and escalating climate change all compound the risks of mass hunger, migration, environmental crises, youth unemployment, and conflict.
Yet the book also offers reasons for cautious optimism. Several chapters demonstrate convincingly that Africa's agricultural yields could still be doubled or even tripled on existing farmland. Achieving this would require sustained policies promoting soil care, improved seeds, fertiliser use, irrigation where appropriate, and better access to markets, credit, infrastructure and agricultural knowledge.
However, optimism is tempered after reading the chapter on Ethiopia. Despite achieving a spectacular 12% annual increase in grain productivity from 1993 to 2021, Ethiopia still had a quarter of its population living below the poverty line in 2021, and nearly 22 million people facing severe food insecurity in 2022. Agricultural success alone is clearly insufficient.
My unavoidable conclusion: Sub-Saharan Africa must also address its rapid population growth, which is only marginally addressed in the book. Strategies such as improving female education, enhancing women's health rights, expanding family planning services, and even introducing pension systems — the latter reducing the need for large families as a form of old-age security — could be pivotal. Namibia’s successful pension reforms in the 1990s serve as a rare but valuable example.
Urbanisation, too, reduces fertility rates — even by nearly two children per woman on average — but rural areas, where high fertility persists, pose a stubborn challenge. It contributes to ongoing fragmentation of farms, even those farms already too small to sustain economic viability.
Climate Challenges
Any remaining optimism dims further when considering climate change. Vast tracts of Africa are becoming less suitable for agriculture or even habitation. Expected effects range from heat stress on crops to longer droughts, heavier rainfall, flooding, and disrupted growing seasons. Regional variation will be significant: increased rainfall in parts of East and Central Africa and the eastern Sahel; declines in the Western Sahel and Southwestern Africa.
Adaptive strategies must go beyond improved seeds and farming practices. Systemic shifts towards larger farms, greater use of leguminous crops (which supply proteins and require less nitrogen fertiliser), enhanced soil fertility, and more efficient market systems are urgently needed.
Perhaps the most striking revelations concern trees and forests. Planting even a few suitable trees per hectare can dramatically increase atmospheric water capture. Forests can boost rainfall thousands of kilometers downwind; conversely, deforestation in the Congo Basin threatens rainfall patterns and farmland yields in large parts of Africa. The warning is stark.
Import Dependence
Africa currently imports 20% of its food calories, up from just 5% in the mid-20th century. This growing dependence strains foreign exchange reserves, undermines domestic agricultural sectors, and exposes populations to volatile global markets — painfully evident during the COVID pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
Several contributors advocate for greater food self-sufficiency — not as a dogma, but as a pragmatic goal. For some densely populated nations, focusing on high-value cash crops to earn hard currency may be sensible. Elsewhere, temporary import tariffs could foster competitive domestic agriculture, following the example set by Senegal’s rice sector. A similar policy is well advocated for Sierra Leone's poultry industry.
A rarely discussed but increasingly urgent issue is the rise of diet-related diseases. Chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension and heart disease are surging, already accounting for 37% of deaths in Africa. Poor diets high in processed foods, red meat, and sugar but low in vegetables, fruits and whole grains are largely to blame. Alarmingly, a healthy diet is unaffordable for around four in five Africans.
The authors call for a radical reorientation of food systems towards healthier, more sustainable diets, echoing the EAT-Lancet Commission’s recommendations. Yet while desirable, the authors overestimate the capacity and willingness of African governments to organize rapid change. They also underexpose another major cause of malnutrition: lack of proteins.
The book also has some additional flaws. The chapter on pastoralism fails to acknowledge that, given the rapid population growth, semi-nomadic livestock systems are largely unsustainable because of their lower food output per hectare compared to arable farming. Nor does the chapter on the impact of political instability on food security offer particularly novel insights.
Geopolitics is also somewhat underexplored. Beyond brief references to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, little attention is paid to Africa’s shifting alliances, the rising influence of China and Russia, or the strategic implications of Morocco's dominance of global phosphate reserves.
However, several authors rightly criticize the past World Bank and IMF Structural Adjustment Programmes, whose neoliberal prescriptions in the 1980s and 1990s, while having some beneficial effects, also damaged agricultural development by dismantling vital support systems.
Concluding Thoughts
Finally, for those hoping that investment in Africa might stem the tide of migration, the news is grim: greater prosperity is likely to encourage rather than diminish emigration.
Pathways to African Food Security is a treasure trove of facts, figures, graphics and insights, offering food for both pessimism and hope. Thanks to funding from the Dutch Research Council (NWO), the e-book is available free of charge.
These pressing questions are addressed in Pathways to African Food Security — Challenges, Threats and Opportunities towards 2050, a book published earlier this year. Edited by Wageningen University researchers Michiel de Haas and Ken Giller, it brings together 57 contributors — most of them Dutch, with twenty African scholars, four World Bank staff members and others. The disciplinary range is impressive: agronomists, economists, historians, a demographer, sociologists and four nutritionists. Their perspectives occasionally diverge, enriching the analysis.
The result is a multidisciplinary, lucidly written, and highly informative volume, brimming with well-supported, often surprising insights and conclusions. Complex problems are explained with clarity, avoiding the patronising simplifications that too often mar discussions about Africa. It is Wageningen at its finest.
Food Security
The opening chapter delivers an immediate jolt. Decades of progress in food security and child mortality plateaued around 2010. Since then, the number of undernourished Africans has risen from 159 million (15.1%) to 282 million (19.7%) by 2022. Slower declines in fertility rates, worsening soil degradation, and escalating climate change all compound the risks of mass hunger, migration, environmental crises, youth unemployment, and conflict.
Yet the book also offers reasons for cautious optimism. Several chapters demonstrate convincingly that Africa's agricultural yields could still be doubled or even tripled on existing farmland. Achieving this would require sustained policies promoting soil care, improved seeds, fertiliser use, irrigation where appropriate, and better access to markets, credit, infrastructure and agricultural knowledge.
Beyond the patronising simplifications that too often mar discussions about AfricaPopulation Growth and Policy
However, optimism is tempered after reading the chapter on Ethiopia. Despite achieving a spectacular 12% annual increase in grain productivity from 1993 to 2021, Ethiopia still had a quarter of its population living below the poverty line in 2021, and nearly 22 million people facing severe food insecurity in 2022. Agricultural success alone is clearly insufficient.
My unavoidable conclusion: Sub-Saharan Africa must also address its rapid population growth, which is only marginally addressed in the book. Strategies such as improving female education, enhancing women's health rights, expanding family planning services, and even introducing pension systems — the latter reducing the need for large families as a form of old-age security — could be pivotal. Namibia’s successful pension reforms in the 1990s serve as a rare but valuable example.
Urbanisation, too, reduces fertility rates — even by nearly two children per woman on average — but rural areas, where high fertility persists, pose a stubborn challenge. It contributes to ongoing fragmentation of farms, even those farms already too small to sustain economic viability.
Climate Challenges
Any remaining optimism dims further when considering climate change. Vast tracts of Africa are becoming less suitable for agriculture or even habitation. Expected effects range from heat stress on crops to longer droughts, heavier rainfall, flooding, and disrupted growing seasons. Regional variation will be significant: increased rainfall in parts of East and Central Africa and the eastern Sahel; declines in the Western Sahel and Southwestern Africa.
Adaptive strategies must go beyond improved seeds and farming practices. Systemic shifts towards larger farms, greater use of leguminous crops (which supply proteins and require less nitrogen fertiliser), enhanced soil fertility, and more efficient market systems are urgently needed.
Planting even a few trees per hectare can dramatically increase atmospheric water captureTrees and Forests
Perhaps the most striking revelations concern trees and forests. Planting even a few suitable trees per hectare can dramatically increase atmospheric water capture. Forests can boost rainfall thousands of kilometers downwind; conversely, deforestation in the Congo Basin threatens rainfall patterns and farmland yields in large parts of Africa. The warning is stark.
Import Dependence
Africa currently imports 20% of its food calories, up from just 5% in the mid-20th century. This growing dependence strains foreign exchange reserves, undermines domestic agricultural sectors, and exposes populations to volatile global markets — painfully evident during the COVID pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
Several contributors advocate for greater food self-sufficiency — not as a dogma, but as a pragmatic goal. For some densely populated nations, focusing on high-value cash crops to earn hard currency may be sensible. Elsewhere, temporary import tariffs could foster competitive domestic agriculture, following the example set by Senegal’s rice sector. A similar policy is well advocated for Sierra Leone's poultry industry.
Alarmingly, a healthy diet is unaffordable for around four in five AfricansDiet and Health
A rarely discussed but increasingly urgent issue is the rise of diet-related diseases. Chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension and heart disease are surging, already accounting for 37% of deaths in Africa. Poor diets high in processed foods, red meat, and sugar but low in vegetables, fruits and whole grains are largely to blame. Alarmingly, a healthy diet is unaffordable for around four in five Africans.
The authors call for a radical reorientation of food systems towards healthier, more sustainable diets, echoing the EAT-Lancet Commission’s recommendations. Yet while desirable, the authors overestimate the capacity and willingness of African governments to organize rapid change. They also underexpose another major cause of malnutrition: lack of proteins.
For those hoping that investment in Africa might stem the tide of migration, the news is grim: greater prosperity is likely to encourage rather than diminish emigrationWeaker Aspects
The book also has some additional flaws. The chapter on pastoralism fails to acknowledge that, given the rapid population growth, semi-nomadic livestock systems are largely unsustainable because of their lower food output per hectare compared to arable farming. Nor does the chapter on the impact of political instability on food security offer particularly novel insights.
Geopolitics is also somewhat underexplored. Beyond brief references to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, little attention is paid to Africa’s shifting alliances, the rising influence of China and Russia, or the strategic implications of Morocco's dominance of global phosphate reserves.
However, several authors rightly criticize the past World Bank and IMF Structural Adjustment Programmes, whose neoliberal prescriptions in the 1980s and 1990s, while having some beneficial effects, also damaged agricultural development by dismantling vital support systems.
Concluding Thoughts
Finally, for those hoping that investment in Africa might stem the tide of migration, the news is grim: greater prosperity is likely to encourage rather than diminish emigration.
Pathways to African Food Security is a treasure trove of facts, figures, graphics and insights, offering food for both pessimism and hope. Thanks to funding from the Dutch Research Council (NWO), the e-book is available free of charge.
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