With the population of West Africa set to double by 2050, this book explores how agricultural production systems and policy will have to change to support this growth.

With the population of West Africa set to double by 2050, this book explores how agricultural production systems and policy will have to change to support this growth.

First Published in 1991. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Rapid population growth, poorly planned urbanization, and evolving agricultural production and distribution practices are changing foodways in African cities and creating challenges: Africans are increasingly facing hunger, undernutrition, and malnutrition. Yet change also creates new opportunities. The food economy currently is the main source of jobs on the continent, promising more employment in the near future in farming, food processing, and food product distribution. These opportunities are undermined, however, by inefficient links among farmers, intermediaries, and consumers, leading to the loss of one-third of all food produced. This volume is an in-depth analysis of food system shortcomings in three West African cities: Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire; Rabat, Morocco; and Niamey, Niger. Using the lens of geographical economics and sociology, the authors draw on quantitative and qualitative field surveys and case studies to offer insightful analyses of political institutions. They show the importance of “hard†? physical infrastructure, such as transport, storage, and wholesale and retail market facilities. They also describe the “soft†? infrastructure of institutions that facilitate trade, such as interpersonal trust, market information systems, and business climates. The authors find that the vague mandates and limited capacities of national trade and agriculture ministries, regional and urban authorities, neighborhood councils, and market cooperatives often hamper policy interventions. This volume comes to a simple conclusion: international development policy makers and their financial and technical partners have neglected urban markets for far too long, and now is the time to rethink and reinvest in this complex yet crucial subject.

This edited volume advances knowledge of food security and food sovereignty for students and researchers. The book analyses and interprets field data and interrogates relevant literature, which forms the basis for decisions on improving food security and sovereignty in Africa. It deepens an understanding of food fraud, and of multinational corporations’ (MNCs) manipulations of food quality to the detriment of consumers. It provides information to advance new knowledge on the issue of international interdependency of unequal exchange, and the inactions of governments against the dumping and waste of food.

Food security is defined as the ability of countries, regions, or households to meet their required levels of food consumption at all times. Food security is an important component of human welfare, and it can act as an indicator of a region's development. This book addresses the roles of trade, policy development, and economic cooperation in creating sustainable food security in the West African region. The largely micro-level analysis is conducted on empirical data from the household where decisions on production and consumption take place. Food security is discussed in terms of its component parts, namely: availability of food (production and trade), its accessibility (incomes and poverty status), and its utilisation (health and nutrition).

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. The Scarcity Slot is the first book to critically examine food security in Africa’s deep past. Amanda L. Logan argues that African foodways have been viewed through the lens of ‘the scarcity slot,’ a kind of Othering based on presumed differences in resources. Weaving together archaeological, historical, and environmental data with food ethnography, she advances a new approach to building long-term histories of food security on the continent in order to combat these stereotypes. Focusing on a case study in Banda, Ghana that spans the past six centuries, The Scarcity Slot reveals that people thrived during a severe, centuries-long drought just as Europeans arrived on the coast, with a major decline in food security emerging only recently. This narrative radically challenges how we think about African foodways in the past with major implications for the future.