Congo’s cash crops are growing; its staples are stuck on the road between farm and buyer.

By Kanisa Magazine · February 2022

The Democratic Republic of the Congo has 80 million hectares of arable, non-forest land, and only about a tenth of it is under cultivation. Some 16 million farmers work holdings that average 1.6 hectares, and agriculture generates a fifth of national output while employing up to three-quarters of the workforce. Yet the country is heavily dependent on imported maize, and around 27 million people were in acute food insecurity at the end of 2021.

February’s data show where the gap sits. It is not mainly a shortage of land or of crops that markets want. Cocoa and palm oil exports grew sharply in 2021, while cassava prices barely moved. The constraint is the road between the field and the buyer: transport, fuel, storage and finance decide what reaches a market and at what price.

What the land and the farmers say

Cereal productivity is about half the sub-Saharan average, held back by insecurity, weak public goods and little market access.

The World Bank’s country partnership framework, dated 24 January 2022, sets out the numbers. Rural households, 55 per cent of the population, earn more than 80 per cent of their income from agriculture, but value added per worker is about US$338 a year. Cereal productivity is around half the regional average. The Bank attributes this to underinvestment on farms, insecurity and displacement, and little access to markets.

Mechanism: why export crops outrun staples

A crop with a buyer, a port and a price signal attracts working capital; a staple sold along a bad road does not.

The BCC digest shows the contrast in provisional 2021 export volumes. Cocoa rose from 38,492 tonnes to 58,238, up 51 per cent. Palm oil exports went from 16,377 tonnes to 46,975, almost a threefold increase, and palm kernel oil from 6,216 to 19,934. Coffee slipped 9 per cent to 12,683 tonnes and rubber fell 18 per cent to 5,582. Export crops typically move through traders who can finance inputs against a contracted shipment. Staples such as maize and cassava are sold to scattered buyers for francs, and the margin is eaten by the truck. FEWS NET’s January price bulletin notes that maize and cassava anchor the diet, that rice is third, that rural households rely on palm oil, and that fuel prices and road quality shape staple prices in the east.

What the price index says

Cassava and cereals were flat in February while meat rose 2.4 per cent, so the exposed foods are the imported and the animal.

In the Kinshasa index published in the same digest, bread and cereals stood at 162.9 and cassava and other tubers at 206.9, up only 0.3 per cent across the three weeks to 20 February. Meat rose 2.4 per cent. The local staple is stable because it is produced and consumed within short distances. Imported foods are not insulated: wheat flour output in the provisional 2021 table was 204,936 tonnes, up just 5 per cent, and FEWS NET notes that the country depends on imported maize.

Hunger beside a land bank

The IPC projected 25.9 million people in acute food insecurity for January to June 2022, a quarter of those analysed.

The IPC analysis estimated 27 million people in Phase 3 or worse between September and December 2021, with 6.1 million in Phase 4, and projected 25.9 million for the first half of 2022. The causes it names include conflict, economic decline, high food prices and the lingering effects of the pandemic. Those pressures sit in a country with a fertile land bank, so the binding limit is access and security, not agronomy.

The investment case in the supply chain

Fund the link between farm and market: feeder trucking, storage, milling and aggregation.

The money in Congolese food lies in joining existing production to existing demand. A milling plant that buys maize from smallholders and sells flour in Kinshasa, an aggregator with a fleet and a storage shed, or a lender that finances inputs against contracted offtake solves the market-access constraint the World Bank identifies. Investors should price in fuel costs and road quality, because those variables drive the staple price in the east. Food systems improve when the distance between farm and market shrinks. For Congo, that means working capital and logistics ahead of land.