What if there were no food aid and food import: Food insufficiency in Africa from the perspective of self-sufficiency

Abstract

Recognizing and understanding food insufficiency and its diversity dynamic variation patterns among countries is beneficial to regulate policies to improve food sufficiency, especially for Africa where poverty is also a problem. This paper explicitly assesses food insufficiency, using land resources carrying capacity, basing on the ability of self-produced food feeding its population in Africa at spatial and temporal scale, and identifies countries' variation patterns basing on five and a half decades. This study demonstrates that although production of cereals improved in total Africa, it cannot satisfy the consumption for its population, get rise that food insufficiency wasn't improve with the production growth. Africa has been in chronic food insufficiency, and food insufficiency fluctuated around grade III. Basing on the range of circumstances of the countries, large-scale food insufficiency covers 1961(1961-1963), 1970(1969-1971), 1980 (1979-1981), 1990(1989-1991), 2010(2009-2011), and 2015(2014-2016). Over 70 percent of African countries was in food insufficiency, even 60 percent of the countries were in grade I, while, only the minority of countries had enough food. Especially in 1980 and 2000, less than 15 percent of the countries were in food sufficiency (between concluded). Basing on the sub-area of FAO for Africa, it had more food sufficiency in eastern Africa and western Africa, moderate amount located at northern Africa, southern Africa had much less, and central Africa had the least, which was almost the whole central Africa. According to dynamic changes of food insufficiency in African countries chronologically, four categories (No.i - iv) of 10 small classes were made. Solutions were proposed to meet the 2030 Agenda, basing on the categories of dynamic change pattern of food insufficiency in Africa, including science-based approach to increase production, reasonable allocation on food aid and import, and population growth and family planning, etc.