African countries must build food corridors linking agricultural production zones to markets across the continent if they are to reduce food imports, lower prices and achieve greater food self-sufficiency, African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Secretary-General Wamkele Mene said.
Speaking at the Africa Food Systems Forum, Mene said Africa has the land, population and productive capacity to feed itself and compete in global agricultural markets, but fragmented markets continue to prevent food produced in surplus regions from reaching areas facing shortages.
“Surplus production in one part of the continent too often fails to reach the deficit markets elsewhere, even as significant volumes of food continue to be imported from outside the continent,” Mene said.
The fragmentation leaves farmers struggling to access markets, processors operating below capacity and consumers exposed to high and volatile food prices, he said. Mene said the AfCFTA offers African governments an opportunity to address those challenges by integrating markets and removing barriers to intra-African agricultural trade.
But he said the success of the agreement would ultimately be measured by whether more agricultural products move across African borders. Food corridors could play a central role in that effort by connecting production areas and processing facilities with high-demand and deficit markets, translating the AfCFTA’s ambition of a single continental market into increased trade flows, Mene said.
Such corridors could also reduce post-harvest losses, lower transport and transaction costs, strengthen regional supply chains and improve resilience to climate shocks and disruptions in global markets.
“Food corridors have the potential to transform agriculture from a largely subsistence activity into a competitive source of enterprise, job creation, and of course, exports,” he said.
Mene called for interoperable customs procedures and greater investment by development finance institutions in transport and logistics infrastructure to make the corridors commercially viable.
He said countries cannot address the challenges independently because agricultural value chains increasingly span national borders, with production competitive in one country, processing located in another and the strongest consumer markets elsewhere.
“Our policy and investment responses must therefore reflect the continental nature of the value chains that we are seeking to build,” Mene said.
The approach is aligned with the AfCFTA Agri-Trade Action Plan, which prioritises selected agricultural value chains and seeks to increase intra-African agricultural trade through investment, value addition and the development of competitive continental supply chains.
Mene credited Rwanda for championing the plan and said the focus must now shift from policy development to implementation.
He called for governments, private companies, development finance institutions and both smallholder and large-scale farmers to mobilise investment into commercially viable food corridors and address constraints preventing them from expanding.
The AfCFTA Secretariat also sees the Africa Food Corridor Initiative as complementary to its agricultural trade agenda, Mene said, with the potential to bring public and private stakeholders together to strengthen coordination and investment across countries and regions.
The broader objective, he said, is to remove the tariff and non-tariff barriers that continue to prevent African agricultural products from moving competitively across the continent.
“We must increase value addition as a matter of priority and ensure that we eliminate all intra-Africa barriers to trade,” Mene said.
The push for food corridors comes as African governments seek to strengthen domestic and regional food supply chains amid rising exposure to climate shocks, global market disruptions and volatile food prices.
