Lukrainian grain has been moving slowly by cargo ship to the world since the July 22 agreement between Moscow and Ankara to establish secure shipping lanes. But will these 20 to 25 million tonnes of wheat and corn blocked in the Black Sea ports be enough to fill the shortage caused in Africa by the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and the raging drought?
Figures are hammered everywhere, as if the dependence on Russian and Ukrainian wheat – 30% of world production – was inevitable. Admittedly, the situation is alarming. According to the African Development Bank (AfDB), Africa faces a shortage of at least 30 million metric tons of food, especially imported wheat, corn and soybeans. This situation is even more dramatic for some countries, such as Egypt – which imports up to 85% of its wheat needs from Russia and Ukraine.
A form of postcolonial alienation
However, to take a step back, other equally important figures deserve to be recalled. Thus, in Côte d’Ivoire, cassava is the second crop after yam, with a production of 6.4 million tons per year. An abundant resource for making bread – which the authorities encourage, even if consumers consider the local product to be of lower quality.
From this point of view, a change in mentalities is essential in order to promote less extroverted eating habits. Togo did not wait for the conflict in Ukraine to decide, at the end of 2019, to incorporate 15% of local cereals in the preparation of bread. Egypt, for its part, recommends that bakers make bread from sweet potatoes.
Africa’s fate on the issue of food security is not at stake in the current wheat import crisis. The continent should no longer cultivate new dependencies, but rather its own cereals. Millet, sorghum, fonio, cassava, maize and barley represent food bases in many countries south of the Sahara. They are sometimes neglected for imported products considered better, in what must be considered as an effect of globalization, but also of a form of postcolonial alienation.
Senegal imports around 600,000 tonnes of wheat per year compared to 100,000 in the 1980s, due to a fashion that is all the rage in the cities: the sandwich, renamed “bread-tuna” in the country of Senghor. No less than 8 million wheat sticks are consumed every day for a population of 16 million.
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