Export crops climb with world prices while staples stall on roads, banks and borders that no longer work.

By Kanisa Magazine · May 2025

Congo exported 70,044 tonnes of cocoa in 2024, 23.5 per cent more than the year before, and arabica coffee prices are 15 per cent above their end-2024 level. In the same country, about 28 million people face acute food insecurity, the highest number the IPC has recorded. A farming economy that is growing at the port and starving in the interior has a market-access problem, not a land problem.

The evidence is in the Banque Centrale du Congo’s production and price tables, and in the food-security data published in March. Both point to the same constraint.

Two farm economies

Export crops respond to world prices and ports; staples depend on feeder roads, banks and open borders.

The BCC’s production table shows cocoa exports of 70,044 tonnes in 2024, up from 56,720, while coffee fell 6.9 per cent to 11,563 tonnes, rubber fell 29 per cent to 4,952 tonnes and timber logs fell 3.6 per cent. Tonnage handled at the ports of Kinshasa, Matadi and Boma slipped 3.3 per cent to 2.37 million tonnes. Arabica in New York rose from 319.75 cents a pound at the end of 2024 to 369.45 on 16 May. Cocoa fell 7 per cent over the period to US$10,781 a tonne and palm oil fell 21 per cent.

The crops that earn dollars are those with a buyer, a port and a price. The crops that feed Congolese cities have none of the three at the same scale.

What the hunger numbers say

Prices of staples in the conflict zone are up to 37 per cent above their pre-offensive level.

The 27 March IPC release from the UN food agencies put 28 million Congolese in acute food insecurity, among them 10.3 million in Ituri, North Kivu, South Kivu and Tanganyika, with maize flour, palm oil and cassava flour costing up to 37 per cent more than in December 2024. The agencies cited conflict that disrupted production and trade routes, bank closures and lost incomes. WFP sought US$399 million for the following six months to reach 6.4 million people.

The national food index tells a gentler story: it rose 3.2 per cent between December and mid-May. Both readings are right. The index averages a country in which the stressed markets are a minority of its price observations.

Why potential does not reach the plate

A farm output has to cross a road, a store, a mill and a payment system before it becomes a meal.

In Goma, volcanic soil is fertile enough that a University of Goma project produced more than 10 tonnes of vegetables on two hectares in ten months, Mongabay reported on 12 March. The same report said ActionAid recorded rises of 18 to 160 per cent in the price of flour, beans and oil since 25 January. The land is productive. What failed was the chain: closed banks, a closed airport, blocked roads and traders who could no longer pay or be paid.

At the other end of the chain, wheat flour output was 215,457 tonnes in 2024, down 1.6 per cent, milled largely from imported grain that arrives through the same few ports. Import dependence and weak roads mean that when one link breaks, the price signal travels faster than the food.

The pattern in plain sight

Dollar-earning farm goods and household staples respond to different constraints, so one policy will not fix both.

Export crops need aggregation, certification and port capacity. Staples need storage, short-haul transport, working capital and secure payment. Treating the farm sector as one block hides that contrast, and so do national averages: a 3.2 per cent food-price rise is true for the average market and false for the markets at the edge of the conflict.

The decision for agribusiness

Finance aggregation, storage and short-haul logistics where roads are open, and sell export crops forward.

Processors and traders should hedge export-crop exposure through forward sales while arabica prices are firm, and put new capital into storage, milling and trucking around Kinshasa and Lubumbashi, where cash and demand are intact. Buyers for humanitarian programmes can anchor demand for local maize and cassava. The soil is not the constraint in Congo. Roads, stores and bank links are.