Blog Surf
The increasing food deficit and demand from neighboring countries, such as Nigeria, Niger, and Burkina Faso, have put enormous pressures on the local and regional food markets. The West Africa subregion gross deficit in cereals was estimated at 9.5 million tons, including nearly four million for Nigeria alone. The Government of Benin has confronted the current food crisis by taking essentially short-term measures, ranging from banning cereal exports to neighboring countries, imposing export tariffs, and procuring subsidized inputs to the farming population.
However, these measures quickly revealed their limits as the Government was overwhelmed by the persistent inflation, rapidly increasing prices of imported inputs and consumer goods (brought about by the Russia-Ukraine war), and the export tariffs set up did not reduce the regional outflows of cereals. Benin has generated little food production surplus over the past few years. The regional food deficit is going to persist in the foreseeable future. - blog.wb.org/blogs
A version of this article appears in the print on August 1, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.