Research Post

By Antoine Bouët, Fousseini Traoré, Pierre Mamboundou, Insa Diop, Abdourahmane Sy and Audrey Lulu Mandi

Key takeaways:

• The intuitive idea that a country which grows all its own food will be food secure does not survive contact with the data. Food self-sufficiency turns out to be neither necessary nor sufficient for food security.
• Some countries that import most of their food, including Japan, Norway, and Tunisia, are among the best fed in the world, while some net food exporters still struggle with hunger. Trade, not just production, does much of the work.
• Africa leans on the world’s highest agricultural import tariffs, yet on balance taxes its farmers rather than supporting them. And the support that does exist helps self-sufficiency only up to a point.

This post is based on research that is not yet peer-reviewed.

There is an idea about hunger that sounds so sensible it barely seems to need defending. If a country grows all the food it needs, the logic runs, then its people will be fed. No reliance on fickle world markets, no exposure to price spikes set in distant capitals, no import bills draining scarce foreign currency. Grow your own, and you will never go hungry. It is the food-policy version of keeping a vegetable patch out the back, and across Africa it has quietly shaped decades of tariffs, subsidies, and self-sufficiency drives.

A new IFPRI working paper takes that intuition and holds it up against the evidence, at a moment when hunger in Africa is rising rather than falling. The verdict is uncomfortable for anyone fond of the idea: food self-sufficiency is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for food security.

FIGURE 1: Food self-sufficiency ratio in the eight target countries and benchmark regions, showing that none of the eight reaches the 100% line. Source: Figure 11 in the paper.

Two words that are easy to confuse

Food security and food self-sufficiency sound like cousins. They are not. Food security, in the standard definition, is achieved when everyone has reliable physical and economic access to sufficient nutritious food, wherever that food comes from. Food self-sufficiency is narrower and more literal: it is the share of what a country eats that it also grows. One is about whether people are fed. The other is about who grew the meal. The slip between the two, treating the second as a guarantee of the first, is where the trouble begins.

The distinction matters because Africa is heading the wrong way on the literal measure. The continent’s food self-sufficiency ratio has slipped from 106% in 1961, when it produced slightly more than it consumed, to 81% by 2019. None of the eight countries the study examines in detail (Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda) now grows as much food as it eats. Viewed through the lens of self-sufficiency alone, that looks like an emergency demanding a production push at any cost.

But is it? That is the question the research sets out to answer.

Neither necessary nor sufficient

Here the authors do something clarifying. Rather than arguing from theory, they sort the world’s countries into a simple grid (self-sufficient or not, food-secure or not) and look at who lands where. The grid breaks the myth in two.

First, self-sufficiency is not necessary. A clear majority of countries that import most of their food, roughly seven in ten, nonetheless enjoy low levels of hunger. Norway, Japan, Tunisia, Cameroon: none grows all it eats, and all are comfortably fed, because trade reliably supplies the rest (often, in the resource-rich cases, paid for by exporting something other than food). You can be fed without feeding yourself.

Second, self-sufficiency is not sufficient. A smaller stubborn[FT1]  group of countries produce a food surplus and still cannot feed everyone. Bolivia, Guatemala, and Zambia are all net exporters of calories, yet all wrestle with real food insecurity. Growing enough, it turns out, is not the same as everyone eating enough.

Swap the anecdotes for the statistics and the same picture holds. Across the world, higher self-sufficiency is linked to only two of the four recognised pillars of food security, availability and access, and barely to the others. In Africa specifically, the relationship is weaker still. The tidy line you might expect, more home-grown food meaning less hunger, simply is not there.

The paradox of taxing the people you mean to protect

If self-sufficiency is the goal, the familiar tools are tariffs and subsidies: tax the imports, support the farmers, tilt the field towards home production. Africa has reached for the first far more than the second. The continent levies the world’s highest tariffs on agricultural imports, averaging around 23%. And yet, when you tally up everything governments actually do, the protection from tariffs and the support from subsidies together, African farmers come out behind. On the standard measure of assistance, the continent’s agriculture is not subsidised on balance but taxed, and taxed more heavily than anywhere else on earth.

This is the quiet paradox at the centre of the study. Governments chasing self-sufficiency through trade barriers can end up squeezing the very producers they hope to encourage, because high walls around some products sit beside heavy levies on others, and the farmer feels the second as keenly as the first.

There is a further wrinkle, and this one is hopeful. Agricultural support does help self-sufficiency, the analysis confirms, but not without limit. The effect is strong when support is low and fades as support climbs, until, beyond a certain threshold, extra help buys almost nothing and can even backfire as surpluses accumulate at prices the market never set. More is not always more. The pattern tracks a long-observed “developmental paradox”: poorer countries tend to tax their farmers, richer ones to support them, and the pay-off from support shifts as economies grow.

FIGURE 2: Nominal rate of protection and assistance by region, showing Africa’s negative (net-taxing) position against positive support in Europe, Asia, and North America. Source: Figure 17 in the paper.

So what should a hungry continent do?

If self-sufficiency is not the answer, neither is its mirror image. The study is careful not to swap one slogan for another. Flinging borders open is no more a guarantee of food security than walling them shut. The honest conclusion is less satisfying and more useful: there is no one-size-fits-all strategy.

What the evidence does point to is the value of trade as a stabiliser, particularly regional trade. Production across a whole region tends to be steadier than production in any single country, so a bad harvest in one place can be covered by a good one next door. A region that trades freely within itself, while still investing in its own farmers, gets the best of both worlds: the resilience of many suppliers and the dignity of growing its own food. The real debate, the authors suggest, is no longer free trade against protection. It is about building food systems resilient enough to feed people through the next shock, whatever its source.

That reframing carries a practical message for policymakers drawn to the self-sufficiency banner, which still flies over much of African agricultural policy. The goal worth pursuing is not a country that grows every grain it eats. It is a country, and a region, where everyone can reliably get a nourishing meal. Those are not the same ambition, and mistaking one for the other risks spending scarce public money on the wrong fight.

Which leaves the question every agriculture minister on the continent will eventually have to answer. If the aim is to be fed, rather than merely to be self-supplying, what would you do differently tomorrow?

Antoine Bouët is Director of the Centre d’études prospectives et d’informations internationales (CEPII). Fousseini Traoré is a Senior Research Fellow, Pierre Mamboundou is an Associate Research Fellow, and Insa Diop and Abdourahmane Sy are Research Analysts, all in the Markets, Trade and Institutions Unit of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). This work was carried out under the Strengthening Food Systems to Promote Increased Value Chain Employment Opportunities for Youth (SFS4Youth) partnership with the Mastercard Foundation.

This post is based on research that is not yet peer-reviewed. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of IFPRI or the Mastercard Foundation.

Reference: Bouët, A., Traoré, F., Mamboundou, P., Diop, I., & Sy, A. (2025). The political economy of food self-sufficiency policies and food security in African countries (SFS4Youth Working Paper No. 4). International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/168579