Africa is one of the regions most affected by food and nutrition insecurity in the world

The African Union (AU) launched on the sidelines of its 35th summit, which was held from February 5 to 6 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the year 2022 with nutrition as a priority on its political agenda.

During his speech, Macky Sall, current president of the continental organization indicated that the focus would be on the theme: “Building resilience in terms of nutrition security on the African continent: strengthening agri-food systems and health systems and social protection to accelerate socio-economic and human capital development”.

In this context, the organization intends to deploy several interventions relating to advocacy for the increase of national investments in the field of nutrition, the strengthening of the capacities of institutions, the establishment of multi-stakeholder platforms for the coordination and exchange of good practices between countries and the management of nutritional data and information systems.

More generally, this theme adopted at the initiative of Côte d’Ivoire comes at a time when the food and nutritional situation of the continent remains worrying. According to the latest FAO report, 21% of the population or 418 million people were undernourished in 2020.

Moreover, it sounds like a call for remobilization in a context where Africa is not on track to achieve the goal of eliminating child malnutrition in order to reduce stunting to 10% and underweight to 5% by 2025 as set in the commitments made in 2014 in Maputo.

According to the AU, the continent was home to 58.7 million children under the age of 5 suffering from stunting in 2019, more than a third of the world’s workforce and only 7 member countries have a rate of stunting. infant growth below 19%.

The need for a change of logic in the design of food policies

If in the past, African governments have confined themselves to the dimension of caloric intake to address micronutrient deficiency linked to insufficient food availability, the reality has become much more complex.

To this aspect, other major nutritional problems have been added over the last decade, such as the overconsumption of fats, sugar and salt, which have led to an increase in the prevalence of obesity, overweight, diabetes and cardiovascular illnesses.

“We observe, for example, in families, people who are obese, but have iron or vitamin A deficiencies. This is also the new complexity of the equation. The rise in obesity did not happen after the disappearance of deficiency diseases. We have the two coexisting in the same country, between rural and urban areas, in the same city, between rich and poor, within the same family between parents and children […]. You can be overweight, even obese and be deficient in certain micronutrients. We even talk about a triple burden, because in a given country you can have people who are insufficient in calorie consumption, especially in rural areas, individuals who have micronutrient deficiencies and people who are overweight or in a situation obesity”, confided to the Ecofin Agency, Nicolas Bricas, agro-economist at CIRAD and director of the Unesco World Food Chair (AdM).

Such an observation requires in particular a paradigm shift in the development of food policies that integrate not only the question of the availability of micronutrients, but also the dimensions related to economic accessibility to a diversified food by attacking in particular poverty. and lack of education;

“There is a new way of approaching the question, for example, that of the creation of food environments, that is to say a system which makes it possible to follow the stocks, in particular what is in the stores, the prices so that they are more favorable to health whereas today they are relatively favorable to obesity. These issues must become a major concern of food policies and this also presupposes the training of people capable of carrying out analyzes or proposing alternatives”, suggests Nicolas Bricas for his part.