By Chima Christian
There is no more doubt left: a global famine is on the way. The impact will be monumental. The war in Iran is only the beginning of what is promising to be a sustained global crisis. Already, we are seeing some sharp rise in energy prices, staples and other essentials. But as we would soon see, the real impact on food availability and pricing will soon announce itself. It takes a certain level of reverse foresightedness not to anticipate another global disruption. Those hoping for the war in Iran to be short-lived may be pushing too far on chance.
Make no mistake, the war in Iran – which is only the tip of the spear – did not create Africa’s food crisis. If anything, it is only revealing the vulnerability of our food security architecture. For long, experts have warned that Africa’s food security systems are unduly exposed to geopolitical risks. They warned that the house we are building can hardly survive peacetime, let alone the sustained stress test recurring geopolitical events have proved to be.
Why are families in Africa increasingly unable to put food on their tables? The answer could be connected to the impact of geopolitical events. For example, Africa was still trying to shake off the weight of COVID-19 when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Because of our over-reliance on imported grain and fertiliser from that part of the world, the war disrupted the price of essential grain. As a result, bread went up by 300% in some cities, other commodities by as much as 400%, pushing struggling families further down the cliff. Four years later, while the continent is still adjusting to the consequent higher grain prices, strained import bills, and depleted reserves. A third, potentially more dangerous, disruption of the decade has arrived. This time, in Iran.
The war in Iran, which began on 28 February 2026, is not primarily a food security story. But for Africa’s fragile food infrastructure, its consequences may prove serious. If it does, it is going to be a crisis mounted on top of a crisis. And it demands a response proportionate to that compounding reality.
Russia and Ukraine supplied roughly 30% of Africa’s grain imports and 50% of fertilizer imports before 2022. East and North Africa’s reliance on that corridor for grains was as high as 70%. When that corridor was disrupted, African countries paid more for every tonne of grain they could find. The Strait of Hormuz operates at a different register but with equal strategic weight. Some 20 percent of the world’s traded oil transits this waterway, as do the petrochemical feedstocks that feeds global fertilizer production. Qatar’s state-run urea plant, which happens to be the world’s largest, has already curtailed output. Global urea prices are up more than 40 percent since late February. Farmers in Africa are responding haltingly to this sharp rise in essential farm inputs. Many more farmers may yet abandon their farmlands because of high production and logistics costs.
Already, Red Sea freight costs have surged and the impact is being felt in African homes. The compounding logic is hard to miss: Russia-Ukraine raised the price of what Africa eats. The Iran war is raising the cost of growing food, moving it, and storing it. These are sequential shocks hitting a food security architecture that was not designed to survive global disruptions.
Africa has carried on as if the world will remain peaceful, and as if geopolitical risks and pandemics will not disrupt global supply chains. Yet when these risks materialise, as they repeatedly do, we find ourselves gasping for air. If we know these risks exist, why are we still treating food security and sovereignty with such dangerous levity?
Africa’s vulnerability is the accumulated consequence of chronic underinvestment in domestic production and processing, optimisation for export, the near-total absence of strategic grain reserves, dependence on imported fertilizers for more than 90 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s input needs, and a deficient intra-African trade architecture. Moreover, governments and private sector players have consistently chosen short-term convenience and profits over long-term resilience. And we pay a compounding price for this choice with each geopolitical shock.
Will individuals, families, governments, and the private sector across Africa finally respond with the seriousness the issue of food sovereignty demands? Or will we sit it out as always, hoping for normalcy to return while looking for new dependencies? Textbook economists talk about comparative cost advantage. Africa has some 60% of the remaining world’s uncultivated arable land. Africa has some of the finest soil and climatic conditions that support plant and animal life. Yet, we depend on others this much for food? I am not against mutual interdependence. What is reckless is not drawing that important fine line between essentials and non-essentials, and creating sovereign frameworks around those essentials.
Our immediate obligation should be to the 2026 planting season. In the face of global fertilizer and farm input disruption, efforts must be made to ensure that farmers have all they need to sustain and substantially surpass current primary production capacity. The second priority will be to invest massively in food processing and preservation infrastructure. Wasting between 40% to 60% of our primary produce to post-harvest losses while simultaneously importing food we could have preserved is a failure too hard to explain.
In the medium to long term, our priorities have to fundamentally change. Africa can hardly remain the world’s agricultural supplier of last resort while its own citizens are hungry. There is a historical irony here that should worry us. While our ancestors were forcefully drafted to work plantations on the other side of the world, today we are willingly structuring our agricultural economies to serve foreign consumption before our own. Whilst we are no longer forced to slavishly work foreign farmlands, today we willingly work our lands to serve the same “masters.“
Why do we grow, for example, cocoa, sesame seed, tea, flowers and others primarily for export, without value addition, while at the same time failing to grow the food our people badly need? Why are we growing flowers for others to decorate their dining tables while our children are hungry, when the same land could grow the food we need? The reasonable sequencing should be self-evident: Africa should achieve food sufficiency and sovereignty first, then grow for others from that position of strength. Not the other way around.
When policymakers invoke foreign exchange earnings to defend this slave-era arrangement, I ask them to honestly examine our trade balance on food. The cumulative foreign exchange earnings from exporting raw, unprocessed agricultural commodities are only a fraction of what we spend importing the food our people actually need. We deprioritise the production of what we eat because we are pursuing “stronger purchasing power.” We grow for others, export cheap, import expensive, expose our economies to geopolitical volatilities and call it a development strategy.
The long-term framework must reorient African agriculture around domestic food production, value addition, and regional supply first. This means incentivising primary production of what we actually need, redirecting land use policy, and directing development finance away from raw commodity export models and toward integrated food systems that process, store, and distribute for African consumers before anyone else. That is how the world works. Kenya, for example, cannot keep growing tea and flowers for export while Kenyans cannot find what they actually eat on the shelves. Choice of what to grow must be backed by regional food sovereignty frameworks.
We must find it in us to design and implement national food resilience frameworks. We have to clearly define strategic crops, mandate minimum reserve levels, create buffers and enforceable legal triggers for emergency measures when international supply chains fail. The Iran war yet again provides the most compelling case in a decade for why we must build that food resilience now.
Our response must be both micro and macro. At the micro level, individuals must take full responsibility for their outcomes. Every deliberate effort towards reducing food dependency is an investment in the right direction. Families can set a target to produce between 2% – 25% of their annual food needs. Emerging technologies and space management systems have made this easier. It has been sufficiently demonstrated that food can be grown in sacs, balconies, and all what not. Families who rely solely on their ability to buy will find themselves limping even at the slightest disruption in the global supply chain.
While governments are encouraged to act, this crisis is also a strategic brief for African agribusiness. Every tonne of fertilizer imported is a tonne that could be locally produced. Every kilogram of grain bought at crisis prices from abroad is a kilogram we could have effortlessly grown. Investors, agribusinesses, and logistics operators should see this moment as the clearest market signal in a generation. The war in Iran is an invitation to expand our primary production capacity, build the storage, the processing, the input supply chains, and the financial instruments — patient capital, blended finance, agri-bonds — that unlock Africa’s full agribusiness and agro-processing potential. Solving the food problem of 1.4 billion people is admittedly challenging but rewarding. Government alone cannot lead on every dimension of this. The private sector must not wait for it to. At Teva Foods, we are doing our bit by developing 5,000 hectares of integrated agriculture and agro-processing estate in the heart of Nigeria’s Plateau State. But it is not enough for what is coming.
Beyond Iran, there will be another shock. Another war in a region whose chokepoints our food supply runs through. Possibly another pandemic. The question is not whether the next disruption is coming. It is whether Africa will meet it having built resilient food systems rooted in its own soil, or having spent the intervening years waiting for short-lived geopolitical calms.
Africa can feed itself and the rest of the world. There is no better time to plant the seeds of that greatness than now.
*Chima Christian* is the Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Teva Foods Limited — an integrated agribusiness enterprise working toward food and water sovereignty in Africa.
