By Majella Mark
- Africa’s food import bill is forecasted to reach $110B by 2025
- There are around 33 million smallholder farms on the continent of Africa
Rice, yams, watermelon and okra are all crops that originally entered the United States through the enslaved people taken from Africa over a century ago. Africa imported approximately 85% of its food from 2016 to 2018, racking up a food import bill of $35 billion. Food import costs are forecasted to reach $110 billion by 2025, even though there are around 33 million farms across the continent. In order for Africa’s agriculture to reach its full potential it will need investment.
Why This Matters: Investors have a great opportunity within the African Diaspora to enter the market through avenues of crowdfunding platforms that can yield a solid ROI, while supporting our brothers and sisters agricultural infrastructure. The lack of self sufficiency is the inability to expand farming production to scale, along with the lack of trade conducted among the nations within Africa. These are things that can be addressed through proper financial support.
There are many crowd farming companies to join as an investor. Kwidex is a crowd farming investment platform focused on everything from soybeans, prawn aggregation, and corn. Agrikaab, CropCrowd and Crowdy Agritech are based in Kenya. Farmcrowdy and Ez-Farming are based in Nigeria. Fedgroup and Livestock Wealth are based in South Africa.
Nearly 60% of the sub-Saharan African population are smallholder farmers but only 23% of the continent’s GDP comes from agriculture. This excludes Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia. The majority of the growth is currently being seen in Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Tanzania. The continent has the potential to produce more if it received the necessary financial backing.
Situational Awareness: Ghana recently announced they will restrict their cocoa bean exportation if proper compensation isn’t executed by Switzerland and other Western nations. Many countries in Africa have now gained confidence to become self-reliant through investment in farming.
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