Metropolitan Food Areas: A Solution for Africa?

How to conduct a policy of sovereignty effective food in a context of strong development of African cities? The war in Ukraine and the Covid-19 pandemic have raised the question of agricultural dependence on imports for certain key products (cereals, legumes, inputs) and worsened food insecurity. A solution is emerging: that of “metropolitan food areas.” Densified, they would make it possible to create local and regional supply chains.

The countryside-city boundary is blurring

Rural Africa has changed profoundly in recent decades. The expansion of cities and the gradual development of rural towns have altered the spatial structure in many regions. In the lower Nile Valley, on the coast from Tangier to Casablanca, in the South African conurbation of Gauteng, in the Gulf of Guinea centered on southeastern Nigeria and extending along the West African coast, in the northern part of the Great Lakes region, in the Nairobi-Kampala corridor, in the Ethiopian highlands or in the densely populated centers of the Sudanese strip, the vast majority of rural populations live less than 50 km from a city of at least 50,000 inhabitants.^[1].

In 2020, Africapolis identified 7,670 urban centers with more than 10,000 inhabitants in 50 countries[2]. Around these agglomerations, we observe the formation of a string of small intermediate towns built on former village centers that have become micro-urban centers. Roads and markets, but also electricity and water infrastructure, schools and health structures are promoting the "rurbanization" of these spaces. Nearly three-quarters of the African population thus live at the interface between rural and urban areas. We are therefore far from the dualistic representation that is sometimes dominant. The categories "urban" and "rural" offer only an imprecise - or even false - image of the changes underway. They do not reflect the importance of intermediate urbanization and the economic functions it provides.

Certainly, isolated countryside still exists. But radio and mobile telephony stimulate access to information and the need for mobility. For many rural dwellers, this need ends up blurring the boundaries of spaces. The road network structures settlements and stimulates the transhumance of people who live sometimes in the city and sometimes in the village, depending on the seasons or the time of life. Moreover, while many villagers are urbanizing, urban ecosystems perpetuate some of the previous rural activities.

African agriculture driven by the rise of cities

According to the FAO, the food economy in Africa is expected to reach $1 trillion in value by 2030. To understand how demand, mainly driven by urban growth of 4.51t/year, will be met, we must dismiss the idea that African cities are disconnected from local product supply chains. While it is true that for certain essential foods, such as wheat, rice, sugar, powdered milk, or certain oils, extroversion remains a concern for governments, the vast majority of food consumed in cities comes from local and regional farms.[3].

According to a joint study by the World Bank and the French Development Agency, food expenditure in Niamey, Abidjan and Rabat on products imported from the international market does not exceed 8% of food consumption, although there are significant variations depending on income and age groups.[4]The city and its outskirts feed the city. In Dar es Salaam, 90,000 million of the demand for vegetables is met by peri-urban agriculture. In Kampala, 70,000 million of the demand for poultry meat and eggs is met by agriculture in close proximity to the city. In Kinshasa, there are ten thousand market gardeners, two-thirds of whom practice occasional market gardening to supplement their income. The urban area of more than 10 million inhabitants has 400 markets, with approximately one million traders. The commercial opportunities offered by urban markets are encouraging increased investment in the agri-food sector by new agri-entrepreneurs. All activities – transport, storage, processing, distribution – are dynamic in rural areas near growing citiesIn Senegal, fruit and vegetable production has increased of 140 % between 2000 and 2020The coastal region of Dakar thus provides the majority of this production. The same trend is observed in the area close to the majority of African cities.

Urban growth is a driving force behind the transformation of agri-food production systems. While rice and wheat still occupy a predominant place in the diet of city dwellers, in street food, which provides a living for fifty thousand women in Dakar and more than one hundred thousand in Abidjan, dishes based on local products are managing to gain a place as part of "local food": fonio and teff (so-called secondary cereals), taro-cocoyam and macabo (made from tubers), alloco (plantain), atiéké (cassava), ngalakh paste (a dessert made from millet and peanuts), local fruit juices, bissap or mango jam, etc.

A model for the valorization of endogenous resources

The growing interweaving of cities and countryside is producing new forms of territoriality. Around all major African cities, both coastal and inland, "metropolitan agri-food areas" are forming, encompassing cities, secondary towns, villages, and countryside with a high degree of integration. The dynamics of these ecosystems allow for the development of endogenous food resources. Their organization follows a geographical logic of activity distribution following the model of Johan Heinrich von Thünen, a German country squire based in Mecklenburgh, who carried out observations on his own land before publishing a work in 1826, proposing an original model of economic geography.[5].

Updated in the African context, the model provides an intelligent organization. The commercial food crop irrigates the heart of the cities, with around them market gardening, fruit crops and poultry and dairy farming and, further away, spaces devoted to cereals (rice, corn, sorghum, wheat but more rarely), tubers (cassava, okra, eggplant, etc.) and legumes (cowpeas, peanuts, pigeon peas, etc.) and vegetables that can withstand storage and transport. Peri-urban livestock sectors of short-cycle species (poultry, sheep, goats, pigs) as well as small-scale fish farming also find markets driven by urban demand for animal protein.

Agricultural land use is carried out along more or less regular concentric rings, extending from the heart of the city to its distant outskirts. By analogy with the von Thünen model, the most profitable crops, involving high transport costs per unit produced, are planted closest to the urban market. Their productivity covers a high land rent. On the other hand, crops with low transport costs, but which are the least profitable, will be in more distant circles. At a distant point, the increase in transport costs can become such that the net profitability of a product becomes prohibitive.

The length of value chains increases as cities grow. This is the concept of the RUAF (Global Partnership on Sustainable Urban Agriculture and Food Systems) and the FAO City-Region Food System (CRFS) which emphasizes the spatial development of integrated and resilient food systems.

Analyses of the reorientation of agricultural policies require states to adopt a long-term perspective to make food systems sustainable and resilient. The approach, which emphasizes the territorial ecosystem, has multiple advantages. It makes it possible to identify areas with the greatest comparative gain for particular crops, to identify the organizational methods of agricultural sectors to favor, to best meet the preferences of urban consumers, to reason in terms of ecosystem services, and finally to model the positive impacts on food security and nutrition. It can constitute a first approximation for the development of policies and programs aimed at promoting food sovereignty, essential for extracting ourselves from recurring crises.[6]. It remains, obviously, to take into account each context, with its specificities and complexities that the model cannot perfectly grasp.

[1] Bruno Losch, “Africa of cities needs Africa of fields”, Demeter, 2014., p.109.

[2] Source, OECD/SWAC, Dynamics of African Urbanization 2020: Africapolis, a New Urban Geography, West Africa Notebooks, OECD, 2020,

[3] Sirdey N., Bricas N. and Dia Camara A., “Food systems in sub-Saharan Africa: characterization and specificities”, Grain of salt, No. 81, the Inter-Réseaux rural development review, 2021.

[4] Balineau G., Bauer A., Kessler K. and Madariaga N., Agri-food systems in Africa. Rethinking the role of markets, Coll. “Africa in Development”, co-published by the French Development Agency and the World Bank, Paris, Washington DC, 2020.

[5] Von Thünen JH, Research on the influence that grain prices, soil richness and taxes have on cropping systems (translated from German), Paris, Guillaumet et Cie, 1851.

[6] We develop this approach in our book. P. Jacquemot, Agricultural and food sovereignty in Africa, the reconquest, L'Harmattan, 2021.