Nigeria, and Africa in general, has slowly become a net importer of food. Not that domestic production has not grown but consumption has grown faster than production. There are probably many factors behind this but one that I’ve been thinking about is the impact of urbanization and the competition between Nigerian historical food options, and global food value chains. Let me explain.
If you could split the world into two in terms of broad historical categories of staple foods, you would have a world of cereals (maize, rice, wheat, etc) and a world of tubers (yams, potatoes, and cassava). Most of the world, read Europe, most of the Americas, and Asia have been in the cereals world while most of sub-Saharan Africa has been in the tubers world. Mostly for reasons that have to do with climate.
Most of the world has worked to make their food industry more efficient. Efficient in the sense of the time and effort it takes to convert raw food into the stuff that people eat and love to eat. And most of that has been driven by the cereals world working with, you guessed it, cereals. If you think of bread for example, a staple from wheat in the cereals world, innovations have occurred over thousand of years to refine the process for making flour and the process for making bread. Of course innovations have happened in the tubers worlds too. But when you think about it, innovations in the cereals world have probably far outpaced innovations in the tubers world.
So what happens when both worlds collide and you have urban populations that care about little else besides how quickly they can make and eat stuff and how these products are marketed to them? When these urban populations are forced to make a choice between bread, a wheat based food innovation, and whatever the yam based breakfast options there are, is there really only one winner?
Using Nigeria as an example, if you think about how quickly certain food innovations have spread through Nigeria then it kind of becomes clear. Bread is one example of an imported wheat based innovation that has become a staple. Indomie noodles is another example. And more recently spaghetti. These products aren’t necessarily more delicious or more nutritious but they have one distinct advantage: they are easy and quick to make and eat. Or store. I doubt the spread of bread and Indomie and other international cereal based food innovations happened for any reason other than just being quick and easy, and there being no real tuber-based competitors. If you wanted to have a yam based meal that you could prepare from scratch without help in 15 minutes, what options are there? Come to think about it, is the fact that jollof rice is much easier to prepare a factor behind its rise to urban staple food status as against yam porridge or amala and egusi?
If you take a step back and think about, what is really going on with regards to the dynamics of food is competition between global food industries and local food industries. And there is currently only one winner. If you develop a food culture that is dependent on cereals which you don’t grow then can you hope to not be dependent on the growers of cereals?
So, what options are there?
One option which we have tried to do is to grow those cereals. A difficult option because the most important factor for that is weather and we don’t have the weather appropriate for growing cereals, the exception being corn. The outcomes have ranged from complete failure for wheat to trying but still not good enough for rice.
No doubt, continuing to try to grow cereals should be an objective but should we also be putting as much effort into tuber-based food innovations? Can anyone invent a quick and easy ten minute based breakfast from yams? At some point we tried the cassava bread flour thing but as any scientist or business person will tell you, that is not how innovation works? It is very rarely the case that the government picks a product that actually turns out to be truly innovative and successful at the same time. A successful product is often preceded by a thousand failures and governments are typically not patient enough for that. But then how do you convince the private sector to try to create new tuber based food products? Or should you fund research in universities instead?
Or should we just accept our fate of being a net importer of food?
On a different note: I sometimes wonder what the world would have looked like if things were flipped and the northern hemisphere was stuck with tubers. Would there have been a yam based roman empire that dominated half the world and would we all be eating some weird five minute yam type dish for breakfast? Or would the world have been dominated by a bunch of wheat growing horse riding Kikuyus? So many questions.