Food Security: An Analysis of Food Systems within Africa

Abstract

Globally, Africa’s food security is the lowest but an in-depth quantitative analysis on its food system is still lacking. To achieve this, food production is used as the indicator for food availability and food price, as the proxy for food access at the continental and regional level respectively. The different dimensions studied focused on the crop production-population (cpp) system and food price correlations/tail dependence. The cpp was found to be stable and the preservation of this stability under a reduced (constant) crop production (population) was verified by the Vasicek model. In contrast, an increase in the population destabilized the system. Given that food insecurity is much more prevalent in East Africa (EA), the extreme quarterly maize prices in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia were analyzed using rank correlation measures, copulas, univariate and bivariate generalized extreme value theory. For all years (2006-2019), Kenya-Ethiopia exhibited the highest correlation while Somalia-Kenya, the lowest. Across different periods, the global food crises (global stressor) stimulated a higher correlation between price-pairs than the widespread drought (local stressor) in EA. Tail dependence is present but asymptotic dependence is absent for all pairs.