Transformation of African Agrifood Systems in the New Era of Rapid Urbanization and the Emergence of a Middle Class

Abstract

It is common knowledge that rural Africa faces formidable problems such as poverty and malnutrition, inadequate farm yields, low use of fertilizers, certified seed and irrigation, and often poor infrastructure. We acknowledge those problems. But in this paper we present the message that there is also good news for African food systems, in this new era of urbanization and emergence of a middle class, that are emerging and developing firms all along the supply chain: the emergence of a “Quiet Revolution in African food supply chains,” led mainly by African entrepreneurs in tens of thousands of small enterprises, scores, and perhaps soon hundreds, of medium and large-scale firms like Bakhresa grain millers in Tanzania, Shoprite and Uchumi supermarkets chains in South Africa and Kenya, Zartech chicken processors in Nigeria, and so on. We show in this paper that African food markets have expanded 6-8-fold over the past four decades with most of that growth in the past two decades, and have begun a transformation. Haggblade (2011) presents a projection that the African food market will grow another 6-fold in the next four decades. That means that the African food market will have expanded more than a dozen-fold in a human lifespan, a massive achievement. Africa’s urban areas have grown quickly, and now constitute half or more of overall food consumption. Food consumption itself is changing rapidly, with a shift beyond grains into non-grain foods like dairy, fish, meat, vegetables, fruit, and tubers, and heavily into processed foods. A substantial middle class has emerged, and is an important driver of food system change, but is not the only driver of change, as we also show that the poor’s food consumption patterns have changed deeply. A central implication of our paper is the need for good public policy and investments to leverage urbanization and diet diversification, to develop food supply chains, to feed millions of people in growing cities millions of rural household food buyers, and to increase incomes of poor rural households who produce food and are employed in food supply chain activities. Rural suppliers need to sell to sources of dynamic, growing demand such as domestic urban