Sub-Saharan Africa holds an estimated 60% of the world's uncultivated arable land. It is home to some of the most fertile soils on earth, to ancient agricultural traditions refined over millennia, and to a rural labour force numbering in the hundreds of millions. Yet over 282 million people across the continent remain food insecure a figure that has grown, not shrunk, over the past decade (FAO et al., 2023). This is not a paradox of geography or climate. It is a paradox of politics and economics. Understanding it requires moving beyond the familiar narratives of drought and conflict, and examining instead the structural forces that have shaped African agriculture from the colonial era to the present, and the geopolitical contest now reshaping it further. At the heart of this discussion lies a deceptively simple question: who controls Africa's food systems, and in whose interest are they designed?
The Smallholder Reality In sub-Saharan Africa, smallholder farmers those cultivating plots of less than two hectares are responsible for an estimated 80% of regional food production (FAO et al., 2023). They are, in the most literal sense, the people who feed the continent. Yet they operate within an economic environment that systematically undervalues their labour and restricts their access to the tools they need to be productive.
Credit markets remain largely closed to small farmers. Formal financial institutions treat agriculture as high-risk, and collateral requirements routinely exceed what rural households can provide. Without credit, farmers cannot afford improved seeds, fertilisers, or basic irrigation infrastructure. Without these inputs, yields stay low — and low yields, in turn, make it even harder to build a financial record credible enough to access loans. It is a trap as old as the cash economy itself (African Development Bank Group, 2022).
Post-harvest losses compound the crisis. Across the region, between 30 and 40% of food produced never reaches a consumer, lost instead to inadequate storage facilities, deteriorated rural roads, and the near-total absence of cold chain logistics (UNCTAD, 2021). For a smallholder who has staked their household's savings on a harvest, this is not an abstract statistic. It is a catastrophe that repeats itself, seasonally, with devastating predictability.
The Long Shadow of Structural Adjustment Any honest analysis of African agriculture must reckon with the legacy of the structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank from the 1980s through the early 2000s. In exchange for debt relief and development loans, African governments were required to liberalise their agricultural sectors: dismantling input subsidies, privatising state marketing boards, and opening domestic markets to foreign competition. The theoretical promise was efficiency. The lived reality was often ruin.
When subsidies on fertilisers and seeds were removed, input costs spiked beyond the reach of smallholders who had never operated on sufficient margins to absorb such shocks. When state grain marketing boards were dissolved in Zambia, in Ghana, in Nigeria and elsewhere the infrastructure that had provided farmers with guaranteed buyers, predictable prices, and seasonal storage collapsed almost overnight (Clapp, 2020). Farmers who had operated within a degree of economic security were suddenly exposed to the full volatility of global commodity markets, markets in which they had, and continue to have, no meaningful power to set prices.