Abstract
Widespread food insecurity remains a daunting challenge in Africa, despite significant gains in global efforts to eliminate hunger over the last three decades. This paper examines the effects of easing trade across borders – through reductions in documents, time, and costs to export and import – on food security outcomes in Africa. To control for endogeneity, this paper employs the first-difference instrumental variable estimator based on panel data covering 45 African countries over the period 2006–2015. The results reveal that poor trade facilitation constitutes a significant driver of food insecurity in Africa. In particular, ineffective trade facilitation is associated with significant increments in the prevalence of undernourishment and depth of food deficit, as well as reductions in dietary energy supply adequacy and access to sanitation facilities. The results show that food availability and food access are significantly hampered by higher documentation requirements and lengthier export and import times. The results suggest that reductions in delays from documentary and border compliance promise to be the most effective trade facilitation reforms to enhance food security in Africa.
Highlights
Unlike Fellman et al (2014) and other studies that focused on conventional trade barriers, this paper investigates the beneficial effects that reforms directed at accelerating the clearance and movement of goods across borders could have on food security
These results show that the proposed instrument is negatively and significantly associated with all the trade facilitation indicators
Columns 2–7 correspond to the food security effects of each trade facilitation indicator – documents to export, documents to import, time to export, time to import, cost to export, and cost to import
Summary
Conflicts, economic slowdowns, and downturns are some of the drivers of the recent increases in global hunger rates (FAO et al 2017, 2018, 2019) In addition to these contributory factors, food insecurity in Africa is severely exacerbated by trade-related barriers, which hinder the movement of food from surplus production areas to consumers in neighboring markets in food deficit areas (Mukhtar 2017; World Bank 2012). As Mukhtar (2017) and Brenton and Soprano (2018) observed, illdeveloped agricultural supply chains, as well as complex and burdensome import and export procedures, are prevalent in most African countries These non-tariff trade barriers prevent cost-effective and timely delivery of diverse and nutritious food items from both regional and global markets.
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