Yes, we have many simultaneous climate series running here at Bits of Science. For instance one about the global temperature trend, another about sea level rise – and of course our series about climate change as a driver to the Anthropocene Mass Extinction (part 47 published last week).

Today we have decided to start another one – about yet another important field where our climate interacts with another crucial system: agriculture. Our main interest will be net productivity, while keeping in mind we have to feed a growing human population on a decreasing amount of land, considering the simultaneous extinction crisis.

Africa already became a net importer of agricultural products in the 1970s and a net importer of food in the 1980s. This import dependency has further increased over the decades and is set to become much worse under the combined influence of 21st century population growth and climate change. Shown in the graph is the dramatic increase of net food imports for cereals, wheat, maize, rice (left panel) and dairy products, sugar, vegetable oils and meat (right panel). Image from special FAO report ‘Why has Africa become a net food importer’, from 2007.

Today and in subsequent articles, we’ll first take a closer look at Africa. Tomorrow we’ll publish the first of a series of articles about witnessed and expected effects of climate change on African agriculture. Today we first try to assess an important background situation – illustrating how possible negative impacts on agricultural productivity will impact both food supply and the economy of many African nations.

Africa’s increasing dependence on food imports

African agriculture is no longer capable of feeding the current African population, with the continent according to the FAO (“despite its vast agricultural potential” – PDF, 2007) having become a net importer of ‘agricultural products’ already in the 1970s and of food in the 1980s. The net food imports have increased by 3.4 percent annually between 1980 and 2007.

Although the FAO authors call the reasons “puzzling” they do cite a couple:

“The main finding of this exploration is that population growth coupled with low and stagnating productivity in food and agricultural production, on the one hand, and policy distortions, poor infrastructure and weak institutional support on the other hand, are the main reasons for the increase in the food-trade deficit in Africa.”

It is of special concern that two of the above-mentioned reasons: agricultural productivity (possibly declining as a consequence of climate change – see future articles in this series) and population growth, could well deteriorate in the near future – further increasing African food import dependency.

African population growth

According to the medium variant of the UN Population Division most recent (2017) Population Prospects, the total expected African population growth between 2010 and 2100 is 3.419 billion people – 262 million in North Africa and 3.157 billion in sub-Sahara Africa. [Based on a pattern of upward revisal in UN population forecasts we consider these figures an underestimation.]

The agricultural productivity trends are complex and less well established, and therefore the focal point of future articles in this series. We can link to previous posts on Bits of Science indicating the possibility of net agricultural productivity declines in North Africa and for instance the Nile Delta – and a mixed signal for the eastern Sahel region.

Economic dependency on agriculture

Another reason why possible deteriorations of African agricultural productivity under future climate change may exert a direct stress on many African nations, is the relatively high economic dependency on agricultural output, as captured in below table per country (values are percentage of GDP for 1987 to 2017) and the map (percentage GDP for 2017).

Agriculture is of crucial importance to the African economy, with most recent (2017) World Bank development indicators showing that several sub-Saharan countries still depend for a third to over half of their GDP on agricultural output. For sub-Saharan Africa as a whole this dependency (16 percent GDP) is about 5 times as high as the global average.

Development of agricultural output as percentage of GDP for African nations, as table (development between 1987-2017) and a map (2017 data). As illustrated in both there are still several African nations with GDP dependencies on agriculture between 30-60 percent – in both tropical West and East Africa and some Sahel nations. The global average is estimated below 4 percent. In the case of Sierra Leone the economic dependency has increased from 42 to 60 percent, over the last four decades. Other countries with high dependence are Sudan and Tanzania (30 percent), Rwanda (31 percent), Kenya (32 percent), Ethiopia and Liberia (34 percent), Niger (39 percent) and Chad and Guinea-Bissau (49 percent).

Possibly decreasing agricultural productivity can increase the poverty lock-in, making it more difficult to pay for increasing food import bills.

To change this outlook, agricultural policy, infrastructure and ‘institutional support’ (see FAO report) will need to be improved, but equally so the underlying root cause trends will need to be addressed: unabated population growth, and possibly escalating climate change.

More about the consequences of African climate change tomorrow.

© Rolf Schuttenhelm | www.bitsofscience.org