Africa Watch – Acute and catastrophic

UNICEF said ten million children in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger urgently need humanitarian aid. More than 8,300 schools have closed in the three countries either because of targeted attacks, internal displacement or fear. According to the body, more than 20,000 people living in the Burkina Faso-Mali-Niger border area will reach a “catastrophic” food insecurity level by June. In Nigeria, over 24 million people in 26 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) will face acute food shortages between June and August this year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)’s Cadre Harmonise (CH) report.

If a horizontal line is drawn through the middle of West Africa, one gets two distinct zones — Upper and Lower West Africa — with varying geographic and climatic traits that shape the culture and economic situations of these places. Lower West Africa is coastal and has geographical and climatic conditions that are fairly conducive for intensive agriculture, managed pastoralism, urbanisation and growth. Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger are all in the arid and semi-arid Upper West Africa, where an expanding Sahara and decades of policy mismanagement have claimed millions of hectares of arable land and fostered food insecurity, poverty, and armed conflict.

In the first two decades of this millennium, discourse around food insecurity in the region has mostly centred around natural disasters, particularly with the expansion of the Sahel and the drying up of Lake Chad, the western Sahel’s single largest body of water. However, the past decade and a half have shown that the human factor is even more consequential than natural disasters.

This human-enhanced change in the natural environment has impacted all of the aforementioned states and countries more associated with coastal West Africa, chiefly Cameroon and Nigeria. The CH report, which focused on Nigeria, identified the naira re-design as one of the drivers of the food crisis, which is expected to worsen in the coming months. Insecurity, a prolonged energy crisis, and elevated fuel prices have driven up transport fares and food costs, further impairing food security. Before the naira redesign, there was the ill-advised border closure which shut vital land trade between Nigeria and its West African neighbours and bumped up food inflation. At that same time, a badly mismanaged forex restriction led to essential food imports like dairy and associated foods being placed on the Central Bank of Nigeria’s import ban despite domestic production not anywhere close to the required consumption.

Other factors, such as insecurity, have aggravated attacks on food infrastructure, especially farms and food processing facilities in Nigeria. These man-made disasters can be mitigated with strategic thinking and close regional policy coordination to remove bottlenecks that prevent the growth of forex earnings and a focused, multi-pronged solution to insecurity. These steps are urgent because the floods of 2022, which exacerbated the food crisis across the region, are unlikely to be a one-off event, according to the experts. The imminent arrival of this year’s rainy season means that anything close to the 2022 levels will portend a problem for efforts at rolling back hunger. Everyone should brace up for the worst.