Feeding Whose Future: The Political Economy of Agriculture and Food Sovereignty in Sub-Saharan Africa

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.

The structural dependency created by this period persists today. Many sub-Saharan countries still import significant quantities of staple foods — rice from Asia, wheat from the Black Sea region, processed vegetable oils from global agribusiness a dependency exposed when global supply chains fractured during COVID-19 and again when the Russia-Ukraine war disrupted grain and fertiliser exports. Nations that had been told liberalisation would make them efficient found instead that it had made them fragile (World Bank, 2022).

Food Sovereignty as an Alternative Framework

In response to these structural failures, the concept of food sovereignty has gained increasing traction among African civil society organisations, farmer movements, and a growing number of policymakers. As articulated by the international peasant movement La Via Campesina, food sovereignty is the right of peoples to define their own food systems to prioritise local production for local consumption, support smallholder agriculture, and protect rural communities from the distortions of global agribusiness (La Via Campesina, 2021).

This framework challenges the dominant development orthodoxy in important ways. Rather than measuring agricultural success through export volumes or GDP contributions alone, food sovereignty asks a different set of questions: Are farming communities able to feed themselves? Do they retain meaningful control over seeds and land? Does the next generation see a future in agriculture, or are they compelled to migrate to cities in search of more stable livelihoods?

Food sovereignty is not the only alternative on offer, however. The developmental state model — in which government actively directs investment, protects strategic sectors, and prioritises self-sufficiency over export performance has historical precedent in South Korea, Japan, and more recently China, and several African governments are experimenting with versions of it, with varying degrees of seriousness. The tension between these two visions is not merely academic: a state-led model concentrates the power to set agricultural priorities in central government, while food sovereignty places that power with farming communities themselves. Both reject market liberalisation as the answer; they disagree sharply on who should replace the market as decision-maker. Reconciling the sovereign state with the sovereign farmer may prove to be one of the defining policy challenges of the next decade.

Several African governments have moved tentatively in this direction regardless. Senegal's Programme d'Accélération de la Cadence de l'Agriculture Sénégalaise (PRACAS) has placed domestic food production and smallholder support at the centre of agricultural policy. Ethiopia's various agricultural transformation strategies, despite their contradictions, have maintained a commitment to input subsidies for smallholder farmers. At the continental level, the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), operational since 2021, holds genuine potential for reducing intra-African trade barriers and building more self-reliant regional food systems though realising this potential will depend heavily on the political will of member states and the institutional capacity to enforce fair terms of trade (UNCTAD, 2021).

Whose Rules? Trade, Sovereignty, and Geopolitical Realpolitik

The asymmetry embedded in global trade rules is not incidental to this story it is central to it. The WTO's Agreement on Agriculture has long allowed wealthy nations to subsidise their own farmers, keeping European and American grain artificially cheap on world markets, while pressuring African governments to remove their own subsidies in the name of free trade. That asymmetry persists. At the 13th Ministerial Conference in Abu Dhabi in March 2024, members failed to advance agriculture reform at all — divisions over domestic support and safeguards for developing-country farmers proved too wide to bridge, a failure felt most by the countries that depend most on the multilateral system (European Commission, 2024; IISD, 2024). The next ministerial conference will be held in Yaoundé in 2026, putting this exact debate on African soil.

This architecture is no longer simply a development question; it is a geopolitical one. The Russia-Ukraine war has functioned, among other things, as a food war. Russia and Ukraine together supplied roughly a third of global wheat exports before 2022, and the blockade of Ukraine's Black Sea ports sent prices surging across import-dependent African economies (Balma et al., 2024). By 2024, an estimated 306.5 million people across the continent were experiencing hunger, a rise directly linked to the conflict (ZOIS, 2025). Moscow has since used grain diplomacy as leverage, pledging free wheat to several African states in 2023 and completing those deliveries the following year food offered not as aid but as influence (CSIS, 2024).

China has pursued a quieter but equally strategic path: investing in African ports, irrigation, and agricultural technology under the Belt and Road Initiative, backed by a USD 50.7 billion pledge under the 2025–2027 Beijing Action Plan (Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, 2024; Asia Society Policy Institute, 2025). Having lived through its own historic famines, Beijing appears to have concluded that securing food supply chains abroad matters as much as stockpiling grain at home.

The harder question is whether African states could treat their own agricultural endowment as leverage rather than liability. The continent holds most of the world's remaining arable land and a large share of the minerals used in fertiliser production in principle, real bargaining power. In practice, that leverage depends on a unity the continent's colonial-era fragmentation was designed to prevent. If food, energy, and territory are once again becoming things nations fight over rather than matters governed by shared rules, Africa's agricultural endowment stops being purely a development question and external powers have every incentive to tighten their grip on it as the stakes rise.

What Is Already Working

Beyond formal policy, some of the most compelling responses to food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa are emerging from the ground up. Farmer cooperatives across Kenya and Rwanda have given smallholders real leverage in negotiations with buyers and input suppliers, turning isolated subsistence producers into market participants with genuine bargaining power. Community seed banks in Mali, Zimbabwe, and Cameroon are preserving indigenous crop varieties better adapted to local soils and rainfall than imported commercial hybrids, while digital platforms connecting farmers directly to urban markets are reducing dependence on exploitative intermediaries (African Development Bank Group, 2022).

These initiatives operate within the same structural constraints that have long limited African agriculture and should not be romanticised as sufficient solutions in themselves. But they show that food sovereignty is not merely a political slogan it is already being practised, imperfectly and incrementally, by millions of farming communities. The question is whether governments, international institutions, and the global trading system will create the conditions for these practices to scale, or continue to obstruct them.

Conclusion

The economics of agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa cannot be understood without understanding power: the power of global commodity markets and trade rules to dictate the terms on which African farmers sell their harvests; the power of international financial institutions to reshape national policy from thousands of miles away; the power of external states to treat African food security as a theatre of strategic competition; and, crucially, the power of smallholder communities to resist, adapt, and build alternatives from below.

The continent does not lack the land, the labour, the knowledge, or the ingenuity to feed itself. What it has repeatedly lacked is the political and economic space to do so on its own terms, in a world increasingly willing to contest that space rather than concede it. Expanding it through serious investment in rural infrastructure, reformed credit systems, genuine regional integration, fairer multilateral trade rules, and recognition of what smallholder farmers already know is not a utopian project. It may be the most practical agricultural policy sub-Saharan Africa could pursue.