Government Created Famine: The Implications of Barriers to Trade in the African Food Market

Posted: Friday, October 16, 2009 Author: Brandon Kaster

Politicians and experts are meeting at the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in Rome this week to discuss the challenge of feeding the world’s poor populations today and in the future. Among the many topics under discussion is the troubling behavior of many African governments who intervene in the free trade of food within the continent. This behavior, perpetrated in states such as Kenya and Ethiopia, goes against the FAO’s longtime recipe for international food security: a reduction in the barriers to trade in the international food market.

The command style economy of many African nations, specifically as they translate to the manipulation of food pricing boards, catalyzes and in many instances artificially perpetrates famine. Governments effectively starve their populations by preventing the free flow of food stuffs and inflating the prices of food on national markets. As a result, communities are unable to afford the high food prices and farmers lose any incentive to increase productivity because of an inability to recover their baseline costs. Additionally, these unfavorable market conditions discourage foreign and national investment in agricultural technologies.

Barriers to the free trade of food, in the form of import and export tariffs, shrink the global harvest and increase food prices. Despite FAO insistence that such behaviors unnecessarily exclude poor populations from food security, 15 countries in sub-Saharan Africa- the region of the world most afflicted by hunger- applied new restrictions last year.

Food insecurity is a distributive, not quantitative shortcoming of the global marketplace. Thus, the perpetuation of hunger in many African nations can be directly linked with inefficient, centralized government controls over the food economy. Food issues threaten African security by fueling civil unrest and the emergence of militant groups who seek their own means of resource control. In the place of governments who are unable or unwilling to provide basic sustenance, powerful armed militias, such as Al-Shabab in Somalia, exploit influence over food distribution and assert dominance over native populations. As market driven famine in Kenya and Ethiopia grow more severe, the risk of internal strife and discontent with the ruling parties may multiply.