Food Security in Africa: The Role of Agricultural Import and Export

The study investigates food security in Africa and utilises secondary data sourced from the World Data Banks from 1980 to 2019 on ten African countries; Angola, Central African Republic, Cote D'Ivoire, Cameroon, Egypt, the Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa selected using the convenience sampling technique. The objectives of the study were to examine the impact of agricultural export/import on food security and establish the direction of causality among agricultural export/import and food security in the selected African countries. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model and Dumitrescu Hurlin panel causality test were adopted in the evaluation of the study hypotheses. Food security was measured in terms of availability and accessibility was proxied by food production index (FPI) and GDP per capita respectively. The result reveals that agricultural exports (AGREXP) has a negative and insignificant impact on food security in the selected African countries while agricultural imports (AGRIMP) has a positive and significant impact on food security. We also found evidence of unidirectional causality between agricultural export and food security and between agricultural import and food security, at a 5% level of significance. We conclude that agricultural import has a positive effect on food security while agricultural export has a negative insignificant effect on food security. It is therefore recommended that, in view of the rapid urbanization in Africa, agricultural imports and trade liberalization should be further used to boost food security in order to achieve the sustainable goal of zero hunger in African cities.