Paper short abstract:

The paper theorises the relevance of a Systems of Provision (SoP) approach to understand African food systems in the global political economy.

Paper long abstract:

The 2007/8 global financial crisis has once again exposed the vulnerability of African food systems and farming systems to the shocks on world food markets. In West Africa, where the provision of major staples is dependent on imports, food riots have exposed the depth of the agrarian crisis (Bush and Martiniello 2016). In East Africa, where major food staples are produced domestically, but price is affected by world food markets, change of policies and restructuring of sectors have ensued the global crisis, with the Eastern African Community (EAC) driving regional bans on food imports and exports. The impact of financialisation on African food system and the farming systems that sustain them require to adopt a more comprehensive and 'big picture' theoretical approach than what proposed, for example, by Global Value Chain analysis (GVC) and Global Networks of Production (GNP) analysis. While GVC and GNP tend to focus on one chain/one commodity, as System of Provision (SoP) approach (Fine and Leopold 1993; Fine et al. 2016) is broader in scope in four major ways. First, SoP can be applied to whole sectors, for example to examine grains as a bundle of commodities; second, it can account for broader Structures, Processes, Agents and Relations (SPAR), consistently with the methods of historical materialism; thirdly,it connects production to consumption by looking at how these co-constitute each other; lastly, it is a multi-scalar analysis. The paper argues that a SoP approach can disentangle the conundrums of African food security and food sovereignty.