Abstract:

Demand for rice consumption in Africa has outstripped the current local production capacities. As a result, African markets have become heavily dependent on importation, especially from Asia. During the COVID-19 pandemic, rice production in both Asia and Africa is likely to be reduced. It is also likely that the major Asian rice exporting countries will resort to stockpiling of their local production, and restrict volumes of (or ban) rice exportation. Such measures could affect demand-supply dynamics and trigger a price crisis in African rice markets. Based on the lessons learnt from the Ebola and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemics and the 2007-08 food price crisis, African nations need to moderate the impact of such a crisis through appropriate policy actions.

Keywords: Africa; Food security; Rice; Stockpile; Trade.

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Policy options for galvanizing Africa’s rice sector against impacts of COVID-19

Arumugam Kathiresan

Tomokazu Nagai

Yusuke Haneishi

Coalition for African Rice Development (CARD), Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, West End Towers, 4th Floor, PO Box 66773, Westlands 00800, Nairobi, Kenya

Arumugam Kathiresan: moc.oohay@naserihtaka; Tomokazu Nagai: gro.arga@iagant; Yusuke Haneishi: gro.arga@ihsienaHY

^{Corresponding author.}moc.oohay@naserihtaka

Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.

Demand for rice consumption in Africa has outstripped the current local production capacities. As a result, African markets have become heavily dependent on importation, especially from Asia. During the COVID-19 pandemic, rice production in both Asia and Africa is likely to be reduced. It is also likely that the major Asian rice exporting countries will resort to stockpiling of their local production, and restrict volumes of (or ban) rice exportation. Such measures could affect demand–supply dynamics and trigger a price crisis in African rice markets. Based on the lessons learnt from the Ebola and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemics and the 2007–08 food price crisis, African nations need to moderate the impact of such a crisis through appropriate policy actions.

Trends in rice importation in different regions of Africa. Share of imports (to the total of Africa) by different regions for the years 1992 and 2017 are indicated in red font. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

Rice trade between Africa and top rice exporters in the world in 2018.

Changes in rice area and production in China during SARS epidemic in 2002–2003.

Policy options for increasing on-farm rice production during the pandemic.

Policy options for overcoming issues related to postharvest handling, processing and trading during the pandemic.

Policy options for tackling market crisis during the pandemic

Trends in global market prices of milled rice (Thai, 5% broken) and volatility in rice futures.

Expected vulnerability of CARD member countries during COVID-19 pandemic.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The contents in this publication were enriched through a multi-year funding for the Coalition for African Rice Development (CARD) from especially Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and other development partners in the coalition (https://riceforafrica.net), towards developing and implementing National Rice Development Strategies (NRDS) in 32 African nations.

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