The issue of supplying food to African towns will remain a major challenge in the coming years in view of the steep urban growth, the small increase in extensive agricultural production and the risks of bottlenecks in the supply and distribution circuits.
Yet it is very difficult to summarize this issue for French-speaking Africa. The situations vary widely and are reversible. Information systems are rather unreliable. Any analysis of supplies to Sub-Saharan African towns raises problems for the inquirer in terms of measurement, the scale of the phenomena being investigated and the time scale.
The first problem is quantifying the economic and demographic flows. The lack of accurate information is due to the fact that records are poorly kept in societies without reliable statistics. This has to do with own consumption and economic circuits which work outside the reach of the law. Africa’s areas are poorly integrated which gives rise to a wide variety of different prices and quantities. With the official systems in crisis, domestic circuits and undocumented flows develop. It is hard to understand how the towns are supplied unless these informal circuits are taken into account. Price and exchange differentials and differences between policies explain the parallel trading flows between Nigeria and the surrounding Franc Zone, or between Zaire and southern Africa.
African societies are also highly unstable in terms of food production, flows and prices. The movement of goods and migration can be reversed. This makes it very difficult to gather statistics. The variances between monthly, annual and multi-year developments and trends can be huge. Apart from the fluctuations, it is a very difficult to define medium and long-term trends.
Global statistics, lastly, constitute a major challenge to the authorities, particularly when they are drawn up to receive certain forms of aid. They are often “purpose built” as a result. The macroeconomic estimates of food consumption or production used by FAO must therefore handled with care. Production is estimated by taking yields and acreages that have been evaluated from a number of samples and applying them to rural populations, of which very little is really known. Agricultural production calculated in terms of the rural population clearly falls as the rural population falls. Relating urban population statistics to agricultural production therefore creates a skewing in the method of calculation. Food consumption or availability is obtained following the remainders method, which only compounds the errors.
A second methodological problem is the scale of the phenomenon under review and the area of reference.
Analysis and observers face a twin risk: the risk of taking a global view exterior to the African societies, ignoring the “inner dynamics”, and raising the question from the point of view of foreign operators or the means of joining the international market; or conversely the risk of a making partial or biased reading, confined to certain societies, making up isolated monographs whose representativity or significance is unknown.
One of the central methodological issues is to articulate the international, inter-African, national, sub-regional, local and family supply systems. Food security arises at the national, regional, local, household and individual levels.
The towns, as places for joining international circuits, are also related to their own hinterland. The analysis of the “hierarchically ranked space” makes it possible to draw a distinction between the locomotive urban centres which create external effects and economies of scale, and the peripheries where the dynamics are induced by these locomotive centres or, conversely, which are caught up in a process of marginalization. Then there is less opposition between the town and the country than there is between the urbanized and the non-urbanized spaces.[1]
Many factors are involved in fostering the supply from small farmers and guaranteeing the articulation between the towns and the countryside. These include distance, the existence of infrastructure facilities, and the dynamics of the commercial, financing, transport and storage networks. Agricultural production is closely linked to urban market access.
The towns also give rise to speculative foodcrop farming within their catchment areas. Although without any land pressure African peasants choose as their commercial crop the one which best remunerates the labour time supplied, the fact that the land is saturated is forcing them to choose high-yield crops: intensive cropping feeds them and extensive cropping brings in the money (Pelissier). The locomotive effects of the town therefore differ fundamentally, depending upon the “comparative rarity value of the factors involved”.
The third methodological problem is the heterogeneous nature of time.
The question of food supplies refers both to the long-term urban population growth rates which will double in ten to fifteen years and the question of the very unstable supply, demand, food pricing, and also the unstable populations.
From a historical viewpoint a distinction can be made between the continuity and breaks. Food imports account for the same proportion of total imports as they did during the colonial period. But they are not the same commodities today. The pre-colonial towns, such as Yoruba or Antananarivo, do not have the same modes of operation as the towns that have mushroomed such as Abidjan and Yaoundé whose expansion dates back only thirty years. The chronological series or the crosswise analyses of Africa do not seem to confirm the “urban demographic transition laws” (for example the nuclearization of family nuclei in the towns) or the “food transition laws” (for example, the growth of richer nutritional regimes as incomes rise).
Returning to the ranking proposed by Braudel (1979) to divide up societies into different periods, one may consider that the daily practices adjust their timing to the phenomena of food product monetization or to agrifood capital accumulation processes in which money is not only the medium for exchange but becomes a self-valuing capital. Although the domestic, merchant and capitalist spheres do not follow the same timescaling, their dynamics are not mutually independent. Moreover, the State is an essential element of regulation with its own time horizon.
What is necessary is to seize on the breaks that are currently occurring, because the adjustment periods can lead to dysfunctions in the food supply and distribution systems, as well as in innovations. This presupposes that account must be taken of circuit segmentation. Time does not pass at the same pace in the African countryside, the towns and the international world. How can the biotechnological revolution or progress made with packaging which is metamorphosing the agrifood change with daba or angady used by the peasantry and the new meal preparation technologies or product-processing technologies found in the towns?
Likewise, changes in urban dietary patterns do not take place at the same rate (Bricas, 1996; Requier-Desjardins, 1989); a transformation occurs in the products, the procedures, social organizations, raw materials and outlets, at different times. Like soil tectonics, feeding habits are made up of different strata which move at different speeds, and which can both coexist and cause splits.
We will begin from the most simple relationship of all which shows the parallelism of the agrifood crisis, urbanization and the resorting to external food supply circuits (see Chapter 1), before proposing a space-based analysis in terms of the variety of different circuits, networks or supply channels (see Chapter 2).[2]
[1]
We shall use the term ‘urbanized space’ to mean a space in which towns
have the effect of linking and leading the rural zones.
[2]
We have co-edited a number of works on this issue, and in particular: ALTERSIAL/CERED/ORSTOM
(1986), Nourrir les villes en Afrique subsaharienne, Paris, L’Harmattan;
Hugon, Coussy & Sudrie (1991), Urbanization et dépendance alimentaire
en Afrique, Paris, SEDES; Hugon & Pourtier (1993), Les villes africaines,
La Documentation française.
