Force 05 / Agriculture & Food
Half the workforce farms. Yields are falling.
More people are producing less per hectare, and the food bill is being paid by imports.
Where it stands
The land is losing ground.
Agriculture accounts for 49.3 percent of employment in Sub-Saharan Africa. It is the largest employer on the continent by a wide margin.
Cereal yield fell to 1,453 kilograms per hectare in 2024, down from 1,595 in 2022. That is a decline, not a plateau, in a region where the population it feeds is growing every year.
The shortfall is covered by imports, which means food prices in African cities move with events on other continents and with the exchange rate.
None of this is a mystery of climate alone. Yield is a function of seed, soil nutrition, water timing and what happens to the crop after harvest. Most African smallholders are short of all four.
What decides it
What decides whether a farm becomes a business.
Post-harvest, not planting
A large share of what is planted never reaches a buyer. It rots in the field waiting for transport, spoils in an unventilated store, or is sold at a loss into a glutted local market on harvest day.
Water timing
A season can deliver a normal total and still fail, if the rain arrives three weeks late or stops during grain fill.
Credit that fits a season
Farm credit has to be advanced before planting and repaid after harvest, secured by an asset a bank does not want. So it is rarely offered, and where offered, it is priced for the worst case.
What outsiders miss
Production projects that begin with a buyer under contract behave differently from production projects that begin with a grant. The buyer sets the variety, the grade and the delivery date, and those specifications organise everything upstream.
What it means
The harvest already exists.
This is not a problem of growing more. It is storage, cold chain and roads, which are known engineering with known returns. Fixing the journey pays twice: the farmer earns more and the city eats cheaper.
The Brief
Get Next Week's Opening.
- How big it is, in dollars.
- What has to be true for it to work.
- Who is placed to move first.
Free. One email a week. One click to leave.