African cereal demand and supply analysis: Past trends and future prospect

For the past four decades there has been an overwhelming dependence on cereals for daily direct human food energy in Africa. Most of these demands were largely met through domestic production, although the contribution of import started to grow in recent years. In this paper, cereal production and import trend were analyzed in 51 countries in Africa from 1961 to 2003. A system model was used to analyze the future prospect of demand and supply scenarios in each country up to 2030. The UN population projection, WRI water and the FAO agricultural data was used. The result showed that 60% of the countries in Africa requires cereal yield less than 2 t/ha in 2030 with no expansion of agricultural land. Among the most populated countries, Egypt and Nigeria will have to rely on cereal import through trade, whereas Ethiopia could improve its stagnating low cereal yield. Expanding cropping land will be limited by availability of water in Ethiopia. Cereal aid will play significant role in its domestic cereal supply. Generally, most except smaller countries in Africa will have enough agricultural land for further expansion of cereal harvesting land or could easily improve cereal yield from historically low value. Moreover, cereal import will continue to occupy major part of domestic supply in Africa, though part of the import accounting for cereal aid will gradually be insignificant in most countries except in East Africa.