The shortfall is about roads, storage and markets, and January showed which links are weakest.

By Kanisa Magazine · January 2025

Agriculture employs about 70 per cent of Congo’s people and yet 25.6 million of them were classed as acutely food insecure for the second half of 2024. The two facts are linked by distance, not by climate or soil: the IMF’s January country report records that farming contributed 19 per cent of GDP in 2020, and that only about 0.1 per cent of cultivated land is irrigated.

The IPC analysis published in October, as reported by UN News, counted 22.4 million people in Crisis and 3.1 million in Emergency across 188 zones, with 124 zones in Crisis. The country’s food problem is a market problem.

The production side

The farmland is there; the loss comes from conflict, weather and the lack of inputs.

In the east, armed violence has damaged livelihoods and rural infrastructure. FAO told UN News that a quarter of herders reported animal losses and 35 per cent of affected households had cut the land they cultivated. Of 3.69 million displaced people analysed in North Kivu, South Kivu and Ituri, 2 million were in the IPC’s Crisis or Emergency phases. The IMF adds that rising temperatures and changing rainfall could cut yields by between 2 and 10 per cent on average, depending on scenario and crop.

The road, the store and the city

A farm-gate price means little until a truck can reach the farm and a store can hold the crop.

Output has to travel from farm to depot to town, and each leg is expensive. The December state-of-the-nation address promised rehabilitation of 38,000 kilometres of agricultural roads in 2025, plus 11,432 kilometres of navigable waterways, port warehouses and modern rural markets, Actualite.cd reported. That list is notable for what it names: roads, storage and markets, the three stages where a harvest is lost between farm and plate. The IMF notes that the economy is heavily reliant on imports, food included, so every weak link on the domestic chain shows up as a bigger import bill.

What the January prices show

Export crops gained while domestic food rose slowly, and the franc stayed still.

The Banque Centrale du Congo’s 29 January digest lists agricultural quotes through 24 January. Robusta coffee in London reached US$5,551 a tonne against US$4,871 at the end of December, a rise of 14 per cent, and New York arabica rose 8.7 per cent to 347.55 cents a pound. Cocoa edged up 0.7 per cent to US$11,623. Palm oil in Kuala Lumpur fell 7.9 per cent to 4,546 ringgit. At home, the INS national food index rose 0.80 per cent between the last weeks of December and January, and the franc moved 0.2 per cent, so import parity did not push staples up.

Where the chain breaks

Eastern supply lines are now the weakest link between farm and city.

The IMF’s report was completed on 20 December and does not capture January’s fighting. Human Rights Watch said on 25 January that Minova, 40 kilometres from Goma, fell on 21 January to M23 and Rwandan forces, and that this cut a supply route into the city. A farmer in Masisi who loses the road to Goma loses the market even if the harvest is good, and the same logic applies to any cash crop that has to pass through the city. A mapped alternative route, with a storage point at each end, is worth more to such a producer than a better seed.

What a food business should do now

Buy and build where the road exists, and treat storage as a hedge.

For processors and traders, the January signal is to diversify sourcing away from a single eastern corridor, to build or rent storage near the producing zone and to price contracts with a road-closure clause. For lenders, the 38,000-kilometre road plan is a delivery test: financed output you can count in kilometres. For retailers in Kinshasa, steady prices in January are a window to lock in supplier terms before any eastern disruption works through to the capital. Food firms that read the road, storage and market stages as separate costs, not a single one, will see earlier where a margin is being lost.