Browsing: food imports

Every African region has felt the effects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with West Africa also bearing the burden of a war miles away in Europe.

• At a period when West Africa has been facing a severe food crisis since 2011, the Ukraine conflict has complicated matters further.
• For most West African nations, the expenses of regulating rising prices are already too high.
• The West African economic crisis and the Russia-Ukraine scenario highlight the perilous linkages between diplomatic sanctions, commerce, and food security.

Africa’s post-Covid recovery hampered

The Russian-Ukrainian conflict has hampered Africa’s potential recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic by raising food and fuel costs, interrupting the trade of services and goods, constricting fiscal space, limiting green transitions, and slowing the flow of development funding across the continent.

The crisis has jeopardized homes, communities, and nations across Africa. Before 2020, African countries were among the world’s fastest-growing. The COVID-19 pandemic …

In the first six months of the year, Kenya’s food imports had increased to sh103.34 billion. The figures collected by the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) showed that the food imports were sh12.35 billion more than the amount spent in the same period in 2020.

According to data from the national treasury, import expenditure increased by 29 per cent in the third quarter of 2021. China is the most significant contributor of Kenyan imports accounting for 31.6 per cent of the total bill from the Asian continent.

This is the fastest growth in the food import bill since a 60 per cent jump recorded in 2016 when the bill stood at sh82.83 billion. The exponential increase has been linked to the growing popularity of digital trading, allowing retailers and consumers to order and ship food and other commodities directly.…

African food imports have risen in the last few decades, reaching nearly US$35 billion a year, according to the World Bank. Most imported goods could be made in Africa, creating much-needed jobs in the process.

It is with this knowledge that a coalition of multilateral development banks and development partners has pledged more than US$17 billion in finance to combat rising hunger in Africa and improve food security. This funding was pledged on the final day of the Feeding Africa: Leadership to Scale Up Successful Innovations on April 29-30, 2021.

The two-day high-level debate was held in conjunction with the CGIAR System Organization and the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), the AfDB and the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). …