The future of Africa's food security policy: 2025 Global Food Policy Report released

The past forty years have brought both progress and new challenges for African agriculture. While overall per capita food supplies have become more stable and agricultural productivity has improved, the region’s dependence on food imports has increased, from 39 percent between 1985-2000 to 46.6 percent between 2016-2023. In addition, the food security, livelihoods, and overall well-being of wide swathes of Africa’s population remain more vulnerable than ever before to the negative impacts of climate change, political instability and conflict, and economic shocks.

Chapter 19 of IFPRI’s 2025 Global Food Policy Report provides an overview of regional food policy developments in recent decades, as well as a roadmap for policy and research to support a more sustainable, inclusive global agrifood system into the future.

The chapter highlights the failures of earlier economic development strategies implemented in the mid- to late-1900s, including an emphasis on industrialization to the detriment of the agriculture sector. Even strategies and policy reforms that brought some overall long-term economic stability, like the structural adjustment programs instituted in the 1980s, often had detrimental impacts on agriculture and left vulnerable populations behind.

Since 2003, the African Union’s Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) has placed the region’s focus squarely on the agriculture sector as the main driver of more sustainable and inclusive economic development. The CAADP’s initial goals were set forth in the Maputo Declaration, including an ambitious 10 percent allocation of national budgets to the agricultural sector and an annual agricultural growth rate of 6 percent. In 2014, CAADP member states expanded these goals with the Malabo Declaration, which aimed to triple intra-African agricultural trade, including through the establishment of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

Macroeconomic challenges and weak governance capacity have limited the success of these commitments, however. While some member countries have made more progress than others on these large-scale goals, most have never achieved the 10-percent budget commitment, and none are on track to achieve all the Malabo Declaration goals by 2025.

In early 2025, African Union policymakers re-committed to strengthening the region’s agrifood systems through a new 10-year CAADP Strategy and Action Plan. This plan calls for stronger political commitment and governance, institutional capacity development, and enhanced monitoring, evaluation, and reporting to hold policymakers accountable to their commitments. It also emphasizes the creation of National Agrifood Systems Investment Plans to better guide the implementation sustainable agrifood system development interventions.

Looking toward the 25 years of food policy and research in Africa, the chapter emphasizes both the challenges and the opportunities that will arise through ongoing trends like urbanization and rapid technological development. Taking advantage of these opportunities to strengthen the region’s agrifood system will require renewed commitment to strong governance and capacity-building. It also emphasizes the need to continue to invest in climate-smart agriculture in order to help the region adapt to a shifting climate and to ensure that the development of the agricultural sector, and the regional economy as a whole, does not overlook smallholder farmers, women, youths, and other vulnerable populations.

Sara Gustafson is a freelance writer.