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Paper short abstract

This paper asks how financial actors render the future industrialisation of animal agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa plausible and investable. It argues that they use nutritional transition models to portray dietary ‘meatification’ as inevitable and to marginalise alternative agricultural futures.

Paper long abstract

As international development becomes increasingly financialised, food system crises faced by many sub-Saharan African countries – from rural poverty to undernutrition – are attributed to underinvestment in the region’s livestock producers. Development funders therefore attempt to forge more sustainable food and farming futures through ‘unlocking’ private investment in local animal agriculture, meat processing and dairy production enterprises (Brice 2022). Using interviews with key actors in the financing of animal agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa, this paper explores how they attempt to convince investors who would typically dismiss such enterprises as posing excessive financial risks that the region’s livestock systems have a sustainable and profitable future.

Nutritional transition models originating in epidemiological research prominently inform investors’ expectations about the region’s agricultural and dietary futures. Positing a unilinear sequence of dietary ‘patterns’, nutritional transition models depict economic growth and urbanisation as leading inevitably over time to increased consumption of intensively-produced animal products as sub-Saharan African food systems ‘catch up’ with those of Europe, the Americas and Asia. Financial institutions mobilise these models to convert forecasts of future GDP growth across sub-Saharan Africa into assurances that increasing demand for animal-sourced foodstuffs – and therefore the industrialisation of animal agriculture – is inevitable. The ‘temporal enclosure’ of sub-Saharan Africa’s agri-food futures (Jaramillo and Carmona 2022) effected through this conjoining of epidemiological science with colonial spatio-temporal imaginaries and financial de-risking practices ‘unlocks’ investment in livestock production only under very specific conditions. However, it nevertheless marginalises alternative futures for animal agriculture through rendering them implausible and uninvestable.