The Next Food Shock Is Coming: Investing in Africa’s Young Farmers Is the Answer

By William Ruto

The disruption of the Strait of Hormuz reaches further than most headlines suggest. As crude oil pushed past $100 a barrel for the first time in four years, and urea prices rose by more than a quarter within days of the conflict in Iran, the immediate concern in most capitals was energy, security and inflation.

In Africa, the calculation is different. Nearly a third of the world’s traded fertiliser passes through that narrow strip of water, and the sharpest agricultural consequences are projected to arrive in the second half of this year when farmers across our continent will be making planting decisions for the season ahead.

Africa has lived through this script before. Over the past two decades, numerous external shocks – from the 2008 global food price spikes to COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine – have impacted the price of bread and the cost of fertiliser in our markets.

Each time, hunger and displacement followed. This time, however, the consequences could even be more severe. If the conflict persists beyond the middle of the year and oil prices remain above $100 a barrel, an additional 45 million people could be pushed into acute hunger, adding to the 318 million people around the world who are already food insecure.

The more important question, however, is not whether Africa is exposed or vulnerable because we are. The real question is how we respond. We can continue reacting to each crisis through emergency imports and humanitarian appeals, or we can seize this moment to build the long-term resilience our economies, and especially our rural economies, have needed for decades.

Kenya is choosing the second course. Three in four Kenyans are under 35, and a similar profile defines most of the continent. These young people are not a problem to be managed; they are the most productive resource our economies have ever held. Whether they become a source of stability and growth, or one of frustration and migration, will be decided in this decade and largely in our rural areas.

The most resilient answer to a fertiliser shock is not a fertiliser shipment. It is a productive rural economy that no longer relies on imported inputs as the only path to a harvest.

That is why we are anchoring the transformation of our rural economies through the County Aggregation and Industrial Parks, which are central to Kenya’s value-addition and industrialisation agenda. These industrial parks are designed to serve as integrated hubs, where farmers can deliver their produce, access cold storage, warehousing, and modern processing facilities, and connect directly to both local and international markets.

Kenya’s expanding domestic fertiliser market shows what this means in practice: Treating agriculture for what it is already becoming in much of Africa, an innovation-driven industry. It means agribusiness, value chains, and market integration in place of subsistence and aid. It means a generation of young Africans entering not the queues of the unemployed, but the boards of cooperatives and the supply chains that connect a farm in Bungoma to a buyer in Nairobi, Mombasa, or beyond.

We are already seeing what is possible. Under the Kenya Cereal Enhancement Programme, supported by the International Fund for Agricultural Development, digital e-voucher systems have placed improved seed, fertiliser, and advisory services in the hands of nearly 150,000 smallholder farmers. More than 86 per cent of participating households report higher incomes. Almost two-thirds have moved above the poverty line. Post-harvest losses have fallen by 85 per cent. Ten new agro-ecology service hubs are now run largely by young people, turning extension and mechanisation into rural businesses, not government handouts.

The same logic is reshaping rural finance. A new Rural Credit Guarantee Scheme, built on $20 million of public investment, is on course to leverage close to $80 million in private bank lending into agriculture, changing how financial institutions price risk in rural areas. A Green Finance for Youth Employment facility will channel a further $15 million in affordable green credit to young entrepreneurs in agri-business and climate-smart agriculture.

What ties these initiatives together is what is increasingly known as “first-mile” investment, the unglamorous but decisive work of unlocking the earliest stage of an agri-food value chain, where smallholder farmers and producers meet markets, finance, and technology. It is at the first mile that production gains are made or lost; that young entrepreneurs either find an opportunity or board a bus to the city; and that resilience to shocks of the kind now spreading from the Gulf is built or broken.

This is why the next few months matter. At the Africa Forward Summit [next/this week], African heads of State, business leaders, young people, and civil society will come together to chart solutions to food security, economic competitiveness, and other common challenges.

At the same time, IFAD’s member States have just launched the IFAD14 replenishment, one of the most consequential global decisions of the year on financing rural transformation. African leaders have an opportunity to come together to collectively commit to invest in our rural areas, and the young people who live there, at the scale and ambition this moment demands.

The case is straightforward. Every dollar of core IFAD resources translates into around six dollars of investment on the ground. Growth originating in agriculture is roughly two to three times more effective than other sectors at reducing poverty, particularly in the poorest countries. Improved financing of agrifood systems could unlock up to $4.5 trillion a year in global business opportunities. This is not aid in any traditional sense; it is shared investment, with Africa carrying its share of both the risk and the reform.

I argued last year, with my fellow leaders from Ghana and Zambia, that the global financial architecture must work better for our continent. The conflict in Iran has stripped away any remaining excuse for delay. We can pay for rural collapse later in higher humanitarian budgets, sharper migration pressures, and more volatile food markets, or we can invest in rural transformation now.

Africa is not asking for charity. We are offering a partnership. The ambition is here. The opportunity is demonstrable. The solutions are working. The moment to scale them up is now.

Dr William Samoei Ruto is President of the Republic of Kenya.