Why resilience matters most in African agriculture now

For a long time, agricultural risk in Africa was understood through a relatively familiar set of pressures, whether around rainfall and weather patterns, commodity prices, input costs, access to finance or the practical realities of moving products through supply chains that often struggled even under normal conditions. Difficult, certainly, but still manageable within a system whose participants broadly understood its rhythms. What has changed, particularly over the past decade, is that the risk environment surrounding African agriculture has become far more interconnected and far less predictable. Take climate change, for instance. In some parts of the continent, rain now arrives heavily over very short periods before disappearing again. At the same time, floods, mid-season droughts and highly localised weather disruptions have started appearing much more frequently. Many producers now factor some form of climate disruption into almost every season, partly because conditions can shift dramatically even across relatively short distances and partly because the timing itself has become far more difficult to anticipate consistently from one year to the next. The same interconnectedness applies to geopolitical risk as well. The conflict in the Middle East has already shown how quickly events far outside the continent can feed back into African agriculture through higher freight costs and shipping disruptions across key export routes. For exporters already operating on tight margins and highly time-sensitive supply chains, those disruptions carry immediate commercial consequences because even relatively short delays can affect pricing, quality and market access simultaneously. The pressure point many farmers are feeling most acutely at the moment, and likely will continue feeling for some time, is the rise in input costs, particularly for fertiliser and energy. Urea prices moved above $700 per tonne earlier this year, with upward pressure spreading across other fertilis