Food security

Le déclenchement de la Guerre en Iran et le blocage du détroit d’Ormuz ont eu des conséquences majeures sur un grand nombre de marchés mondiaux de matières premières. Si l’attention médiatique s’est logiquement portée sur le pétrole et le gaz naturel, ainsi que sur l’aluminium, en raison de la forte dépendance de l’offre de ce métal aux prix de l’énergie, le soufre, comme l’hélium, l’éthylène, le propylène ou l’urée, a également été pris dans les rets de ce conflit. Loin d’être une ...

The renewed instability in the Middle East has exposed Africa's continued vulnerability to external energy shocks. Shipping disruptions through the Strait of Hormuz, the maritime chokepoint through which roughly one-fifth of global oil and LNG supplies transit, have once again demonstrated that African fuel security remains highly dependent on geopolitical developments beyond the continent. While many African economies have traditionally relied on refined petroleum imports from Gulf ...

This paper addresses the persistent challenge of resource dependence in the world's poorest countries, focusing on the ten poorest African nations where natural- resource rents average 14% of income. It argues that four decades of conventional policy advice, which treated resource dependence primarily as a revenue management problem, have failed to help these countries. While stabilization funds and permanent-income frameworks aim to smooth consumption, they do not answer the fundam ...

Ethiopia continues to struggle to lay the economic foundations of food security for all, more than 30 years after first adopting the East Asian Developmental State Model (EADS) under Zenawi (1911-2012), continued under Hailemariam Desalegn (2012-April 2018), and later shifting toward a neo-liberal, Washington consensus-oriented approach under Abiy Ahmed (2018-present). The achievements recorded under the EADS approach—particularly double-digit annual growth, substantial poverty ...

As El Niño intensifies it generates apprehension among us all. The slow pace of the energy transition and continued carbon emissions have already put us on a trajectory toward an average air temperature rise of 2.8°C above pre-industrial levels (1850)—far exceeding the 1.5°C limit set by the 2015 Paris Agreement. ...

Africa today remains far from food secure. Chronic malnutrition, widespread anemia among women of childbearing age, stunting and wasting among young children, pervasive underemployment in both rural and urban areas, and a youth bulge frustrated by high unemployment are key features of a continent that is seriously off track with respect to the SDG deadline: only 6% of SDGs have been implemented (Mo Ibrahim Forum, 2025).Despite this dismal progress, Africa can still achieve “The Afri ...

This article draws in part on perspectives shared by members of the Rihla Initiative for Green Economic Growth, whose regional insights helped inform the sections on how the costs of the war are being felt across the Global South. The war on Iran and in the Gulf has made it impossible to treat the Strait of Hormuz as a regional issue. The disruption around the Strait has moved through the world economy in concrete ways, from higher fuel bills and pressure on food and fertilizer ...

This Opinion was originally published on dev-front.org, by Hafez Ghanem, Senior Fellow at the Policy Center for the New South.Joe Studwell has spent most of his career working on Asia and brings an interesting fresh perspective on the economics of Africa. This makes the book worth reading even if one disagrees with some conclusions.   The book’s main argument is that Africa should follow the Asian model of first focusing on smallholder agriculture, then labor intensive manufact ...