By Ian Ortega Aliro
In 2024, I attended Prof. Gituro Wainaina’s lecture on the future of Global Economics and Sustainable Development. Although I spent most of the lecture presenting my counterarguments, two months the road, I wanted to call him and say – “Prof, you were right on everything.”
Prof. Gituro had presented an alarming finding that Africa was the only region in the world where population growth had outpaced cereal productivity. The biggest threat to Africa’s future was not some great war, disease, it was food. How was Africa going to feed itself?
And when we talk of food security, we mean grain/cereal productivity. Take wheat for example, 𝒊𝒏 𝑼𝒈𝒂𝒏𝒅𝒂 𝒂𝒍𝒐𝒏𝒆, 𝒘𝒆 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒔𝒖𝒎𝒆𝒅 750,000 𝑴𝑻 𝒐𝒇 𝒘𝒉𝒆𝒂𝒕 𝒊𝒏 2025, 𝒊𝒏 𝑲𝒆𝒏𝒚𝒂 𝒊𝒕 𝒘𝒂𝒔 3,150,000 𝑴𝑻. Up to 95% of this wheat was imported from countries such as Russia and Ukraine. These consumption numbers are growing as Africa rapidly urbanizes.
If you think about maize production, we get about 10 times less than what an American farmer gets from a hectare. This is further compounded by the poor-post harvesting infrastructure. We do not have the requisite drying facilities (maize must be dried to the right moisture content) and also lack the right storage infrastructure (the silos). For maize, this implies that you end up with issues such as Aflatoxin which accounts for a sizeable number of cancer cases. And kid you not, most school diets are heavily dependent on maize flour. The bulk of most of our animal feed is made of maize bran. We are scoring own goals.
Africa cannot rise before it settles the food question. The food question is an existential one. We are doomed if we are late to providing answers to that question.
About the Author: Ian Ortega Aliro started as a mechanical engineer, ran innovation and capex projects at Uganda Breweries/Diageo, and earned his MBA at Strathmore. Today, working inside a wheat and maize mill, he brings engineering precision and business strategy to one of Africa’s most urgent questions — how do we feed ourselves?
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