Staple food market sheds in West Africa

Africa’s market demand for food staples will grow dramatically in coming decades. This paper aims to identify the geographic extent of major staple food market sheds in West Africa as well as the major trade corridors that link surplus producing areas with the deficit markets they serve.

The paper clarifies that rainfed agriculture dominates the production of coarse cereals, which leads to annual variations in the volume and direction of marketed flows. Identically, the increasingly volatile world price shocks induce consumer and trader responses across West Africa.

Conclusions contain:

• drought-tolerant crops such as sorghum, millet and cassava have great importance as a key part of private sector market system response to major food shocks
• furthermore, the interactions between food and feed stocks serve as potential shock absorbers in the regional food system
• in addition, consumer substitution among food staples and the magnitude of interactions between various staple food marketing systems merits investigation

• facilitating expansion of staple food markets will be critical for efforts at stimulating agricultural production growth, broad-based income expansion and poverty reduction
• in order to maintain producer incentives in Africa’s many surplus food production zones, farmers will need reliable access to regional food markets
• in this respect, the welter of tariffs, export restrictions and other manmade impediments to cross-border trade in food staples are real problems that should be tackled