West Africa food trade hits almost US$10bn a year 

By Evelyn ARTHUR

Fresh research by the OECD–OCDE has estimated food trade in the West African sub-region at almost US$10billion per annum – about six times higher than the official figure of US$1.7billion often cited by policymakers.

OCDE is a French abbreviation of the OECD, which stands for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. The new estimate suggests that a large share of regional food trade is taking place outside official reporting systems.

According to Ziad Hamoui, a chartered logistician and founding member of Borderless Alliance, the wide gap exists because there is little data on the massive volumes of goods which cross borders informally.

He told Business & Financial Times (B&FT) that these traders are not smugglers but legitimate economic actors operating outside the recognised system.

Mr. Hamoui revealed that aside from cocoa and cashew exports, close to 38 percent of West Africa’s food trade remains within the region – a level comparable to what occurs in the European Union. “Yet policy debates always cite the 15 percent figure derived from incomplete official statistics,” he emphasised.

On food security, he disclosed that about 68 trillion kilocalories cross West African borders annually – enough to meet the yearly energy needs of about 80 million people, representing roughly a quarter of the region’s population.

In protein terms, he said, some 2.6 billion kilogrammes of livestock and fish move across borders within the region each year. This, he noted, is not small-scale or subsistence activity but large-volume trade occurring over long distances.

He added that West African countries trade with a median of 12 partners out of a possible 14. “Major exporters such as Senegal, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire conduct almost 60 percent of West Africa’s regional food trade with non-neighbouring countries,” he said.

Mr. Hamoui explained that Borderless Alliance’s experience – from observing border crossings and engaging with thousands of traders across the region – shows a relentless flow of goods that is not captured in official reports.

He cited Ghana’s maiden Informal Cross-Border Trade Survey, conducted in late 2024, which indicated that informal trade accounted for 61.2 percent of total trade with Togo and 55.7 percent with Côte d’Ivoire. “We have been designing policies for a formal economy that represents a minority of actual commerce,” he said.

“You cannot manage what you cannot measure and you certainly cannot design effective food security strategies, infrastructure investments or trade facilitation measures when your baseline data captures only a fraction of the actual economy,” he added.

Just as governments invest in roads, ports and border posts, he argued, similar attention must be given to statistical infrastructure – the systems that reveal where such investments should truly be directed.

He therefore expressed appreciation to the OECD–OCDE and ECOWAS Commission for undertaking this research through the ECOWAS Agricultural Trade Programme. According to him, the path to evidence-based policy begins with recognising and measuring the economy as it actually exists.

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