News & Views

Progress in agricultural production in Africa has not kept pace with the rapid population growth, a worrying trend that has resulted in the food-insecure population growing by 60% in the last 10 years.

While low crop yields, extreme weather, conflict, and economic pressures are commonly understood to contribute to food insecurity, a less often considered factor is transport. Poor quality infrastructure, inadequate storage, and border crossing bottlenecks all contribute to inefficient and expensive supply chains that are vulnerable to disruption, threatening to plunge people to hunger when shocks arise.

Recently, the World Bank published a report providing a detailed examination of transport connectivity’s role in food security in Africa today, and identifying 50 potential measures that would strengthen the continent’s supply chains and contribute to a food system that will provide affordable, reliable access to food for all.

ITP is proud to have contributed to this report, using our modelling and technical analysis expertise to provide the evidence that informed the authors’ work. For this, we developed a Python-based food & fertilizer model covering inter-continental trade, intra-Africa trade, and in-country distribution. We consider the four-most consumed staples in Africa – cassava, maize, rice, and wheat – which account for almost half the calories consumed on the continent.

Although similar global and regional models have been created before, these typically have insufficient detail in Africa, depend on detailed data which is not available in all countries, or does not focus sufficiently on the elements most important to food security.

A key component of our work was the development of indicators that can be used to link transport issues to food availability, helping understand how transport infrastructure investments or trade policy changes would impact food security. Examples of these indicators are:

• Detour cost: the cost incurred if a network link is not longer usable. This is used to identify critical network links and to quantify the impacts that disruption could cause.
• Food access catchments: the amount of food that can be reached in a certain amount of time (or transport cost). This could be applied with or without policies and non-tariff barriers that hinder trade between neighbouring countries.
• The contribution of transport costs to commodity prices.
• Total length of supply chains.

You can download the full report here: 🔗 http://wrld.bg/bIe050VViwg

To find out more about our work in food & freight in Africa, or ITP’s other modelling capabilities, please contact Giles Lipscombe or get in touch via our website

Below are some of visuals from ITP’s modelling contributions.