The Breadbasket Trade: How Cereals, Sugar & Cooking Oil Are Quietly Building Africa's Internal Economy

An Africa Brew Brief Investigation

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There's a myth that Africa doesn't feed itself. It's only half true. While the continent's headline export crops — cocoa, coffee, cashew, tea — sail out to Amsterdam, Shanghai, and Dubai, a quieter trade is happening between African borders: bags of maize crossing from Tanzania into Kenya, sugar trucks rolling out of Eswatini into Johannesburg, and drums of cooking oil moving from Lagos refineries into the Sahel. This is the trade that actually feeds African households — and it's dominated by three categories: cereals, sugar, and cooking oils, which together with beverages account for roughly 64 percent of intra-Africa trade in agricultural consumer goods.

This is the story of who grows it, who buys it, who's investing behind the scenes — and why AfCFTA could turn this humble trade into Africa's next industrial frontier.

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## I. CEREALS: The Continent's Most Political Commodity

Maize is Africa's staple — and its most exposed vulnerability. It remains the most produced cereal in Sub-Saharan Africa, yet the region is projected to import approximately 4.7 million tonnes in the 2024/2025 marketing year — the third-highest import level since 2013/2014. Production is expected to fall to 80.2 million tonnes, down from 83.6 million tonnes the year before, largely due to weather shocks.

**Who's selling:** South Africa remains the undisputed regional cereal hub. Africa's continental maize consumption stood at 110 million tonnes in 2024, led by Egypt, South Africa, and Nigeria, while production came to 94 million tonnes, led by South Africa, Nigeria, and Ethiopia. On the export side, South Africa dominates with 3.8 million tonnes shipped, while Egypt is the largest single importer, taking in 9.2 million tonnes.

Zooming into the numbers behind South Africa's regional dominance: Zimbabwe is the largest importer of South African maize, taking 56% of total exports, with Namibia and Botswana also significant markets. The trade corridor is worth real money — South Africa's cereal exports to Zimbabwe alone hit $417.83 million in 2025, of which corn (maize) accounted for $365.66 million.

Tanzania has quietly become East Africa's swing producer, exporting maize and maize meal to Zambia, Malawi, and DRC, while its surplus flows mainly to Kenya and Burundi in East Africa, with smaller volumes reaching Malawi, DRC, and Zambia in the south.

**Who's buying:** The deficit belt is well defined: Kenya, South Sudan, Somalia, Rwanda, and Burundi are structurally reliant on imports from Uganda, Tanzania, and Ethiopia to cover their shortfalls. In the south, the picture is starker — every country in the Southern African region except South Africa faces some level of deficit, with over 2 million metric tonnes needed from outside the region in the 2024/25 marketing year alone. At least 5 million metric tonnes of external imports are required to meet the region's total maize demand this cycle — sourced largely from the Americas, Ukraine, and Russia, because intra-African supply simply isn't enough.

A market signal worth watching: Zimbabwe's maize import demand has jumped exponentially, alongside stable buying from Kenya and Morocco, signalling that food-security-driven demand is now defining Sub-Saharan Africa's maize trade. Pricing reflects this urgency — Zimbabwe's maize import price sits at roughly $370 per tonne, a premium tier tied to freight costs and supply-security concerns, compared to $180–200/tonne in bulk commodity markets like Brazil and Canada.

The long game: by 2035, Africa's maize market is projected to reach 128 million tonnes and $50 billion in value, growing at roughly 1.3% volume CAGR and 1.9% value CAGR. That's a continent-sized market still waiting for continent-sized processing infrastructure.

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## II. SUGAR: Africa's Sweetest Trade Imbalance

Sugar is where intra-African trade gets genuinely dynamic — and genuinely contested.

**Who's producing and selling:** Egypt, South Africa, and Swaziland (Eswatini) are the continent's leading sugar producers, together contributing 51% of total African output — Egypt alone producing 2.8 million tonnes in 2024. On export value, South Africa ($394 million), Morocco ($366 million), and Eswatini ($359 million) accounted for 44% of total African sugar exports in 2024. Within intra-continental flows specifically, Egypt is the dominant sugar exporter while South Sudan is the largest single importer as of 2024.

South Africa's own trade data reveals the granularity: it exported $489 million in raw sugar in 2024, led by shipments to Namibia ($80.4 million), Malaysia ($77.4 million), and South Korea ($58.1 million). On the flip side, South Africa imported $351 million in raw sugar the same year, primarily from Eswatini ($246 million) and Brazil ($88.1 million) — a reminder that even the region's biggest producer is also a major buyer, largely due to preferential SACU trade terms with Eswatini.

The friction point governments should watch: in the 2024/25 season, South Africa imported 213,322 tonnes of sugar from outside the Southern African Customs Union, which Illovo says cut grower revenue by roughly R1 billion and miller revenue by about R500 million. This is a live case study in how porous tariff regimes can undercut domestic value chains even as intra-regional volumes rise.

**Who's investing:** Illovo Sugar Africa, wholly owned by Associated British Foods, is the continent's largest sugar producer and has invested across six African countries, all in Southern Africa. The expansion of Southern Africa's sugar industry has been driven substantially by foreign direct investment — new sugar mills, improved cane varieties, and supply chain infrastructure, with Southern and Northern Africa historically capturing the largest share of the continent's sugar-sector FDI.

**Consumption geography:** Egypt, Sudan, and South Africa are the largest sugar consumers, together making up about 30% of total African consumption, with a second tier — Algeria, Morocco, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eswatini, Somalia, and Tanzania — adding a further 36%. Growth patterns diverge sharply by region: East and West Africa, with younger and faster-urbanizing populations, are expected to see above-average demand growth, while North African markets face more moderated growth due to higher existing consumption and health-policy pressure. By 2035, the sugarcane market alone is forecast to reach 103 million tonnes valued at $194.7 billion.

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## III. COOKING OILS: The Import Bill Nobody Talks About

If cereals are Africa's food-security anxiety and sugar is its trade-friction case study, cooking oil is its most under-processed opportunity.

**The market:** Africa's edible oil market is projected to reach $12.5 billion by 2027, driven by urbanization and a growing middle class. Demand is intensely local and often import-dependent: Kenya is roughly 80% reliant on imports, with annual sunflower oil demand of around 120,000 metric tonnes, while Nigeria's palm oil consumption is rising about 7% year-on-year on the back of processed food demand.

**Who's producing:** Palm oil is the continental heavyweight. Nigeria's palm oil production stood at 1.4 million metric tonnes in 2022 and 2021, and 1.275 million metric tonnes in 2020, with Nigeria, Ghana, and Côte d'Ivoire the dominant cultivation belt where palm oil plays a central role in both diets and local economies. By regional market share, Ghana held the largest single share of Africa's oils and fats market at 25.23% in 2024, while Egypt is projected to post the fastest growth at a 5.78% CAGR through 2030.

**Who's investing:** This is where the category gets genuinely exciting for value-addition plays. Angola opened a new vegetable and palm oil factory in Luanda in August 2024, backed by a $90 million investment aimed at strengthening the country's domestic oil market presence. Global agribusiness giants are moving in on processing capacity: Olam Agri expanded its soybean programme in Nigeria in June 2025, integrating 5,000 smallholder farmers into its supply chain in Kwara State as part of a broader edible-oils strategy, while Wilmar completed the first phase of an edible oils refining plant in South Africa's Richards Bay Industrial Development Zone in May 2024, using the port's deep-water access and pipeline connection to receive imported crude oil directly for processing.

Even oil-major diversification is showing up in the sector — Eni built an oilseed collection and pressing agri-hub in Makueni, Kenya, with an installed capacity of 15,000 tonnes, producing its first vegetable oils for bio-refineries.

**The regional divergence:** South Africa leads Middle East and Africa vegetable oil market share at 34.38% in 2024, with new logistics hubs emerging in Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt to shorten lead times and diversify routes, and sunflower oil is forecast to grow at a 5.35% CAGR through 2030.

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## IV. AfCFTA: The Rulebook That Could Rewrite This Whole Trade

Here's the uncomfortable baseline: despite being staple goods, only about 20% of African food exports stayed within Africa over the 2012–2016 review period, while 84% of Africa's total agricultural imports originated from outside the continent. Agricultural products as a whole punch below their weight in intra-African trade — accounting for only 23% of it, with manufactured goods like chemicals, machinery, and plastics dominating instead.

This is precisely the gap AfCFTA was built to close. The African Continental Free Trade Area agreement was created in 2018 and entered into force on January 1, 2021, as a major milestone under the African Union's Agenda 2063, and it is expected to help integrate African economies and drive increased intra-regional trade. Analysts are already tracking early movement, with evidence of a growing share of intra-Africa trade in high-value agricultural commodities since the agreement's rollout.

On the ground, momentum is visible in cereals specifically — under AfCFTA, tariffs on many intra-African goods are being reduced and trade procedures harmonised, with regional trade corridors expanding particularly for staple crops. Kenya is emerging as the connective tissue of this shift, acting as a central hub facilitating movement of agricultural goods across both the East African Community and IGAD regions, while Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi primarily engage in intra-regional trade.

But the obstacles still standing in the way are real: trade imbalances, infrastructure gaps, and shifting market demands require urgent policy interventions, with harmonising trade policies, improving infrastructure, and building producer capacity flagged as crucial for sustaining growth.

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## V. The Value-Addition Opportunity Governments Keep Leaving on the Table

The pattern across all three commodities is identical: Africa exports raw, imports refined, and pays twice.

**Cereals** — Africa mills a fraction of the maize it consumes into higher-value products (meal, starch, animal feed formulations) before it's traded — most of what crosses borders is raw grain.

**Sugar** — Yield per hectare across African sugar production lags significantly behind global benchmarks, meaning the continent is under-extracting value from land it already farms — a processing and agronomy gap, not a land gap.

**Cooking oil** — The Wilmar and Olam Agri investments above are the blueprint — capturing smallholder oilseed supply chains and refining domestically, rather than importing finished vegetable oil at a premium.

This is exactly the terrain where cold-chain and processing infrastructure investors, agro-processing manufacturers, and patient capital vehicles like blended-finance agribusiness funds have room to move — not by competing on raw commodity price, but by owning the mile between farm gate and finished product.

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## VI. Who's Leading, Who Has Potential

In cereals, South Africa leads as the regional export hub, with Egypt as the largest importer and consumer. But the real upside sits with Tanzania, Zambia, and Ethiopia — surplus producers still without the processing scale to convert that surplus into margin.

In sugar, Egypt, Eswatini, and South Africa dominate production and export value today. The next wave belongs to Kenya and Tanzania, now the fastest-growing destination markets for South African sugar exports and ripe for domestic milling investment of their own.

In cooking oils, South Africa, Nigeria, and Ghana currently lead on production and market share. But Angola's fresh $90 million refinery bet, Kenya's Eni-backed agri-hub model, and DRC's still-untapped oilseed land all point to where the next decade of capital is likely to flow.

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## VII. The Takeaway for Governments and Agribusiness

Food security and trade policy are now the same conversation. Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Morocco's import surges show that staple demand is becoming structurally, not seasonally, driven. Governments planning grain reserves without regional trade corridors are planning for the wrong scenario.

Tariff loopholes cost real money. The Illovo/SACU sugar case is a live warning — regional trade frameworks only protect domestic value chains when enforcement matches ambition.

Processing capacity, not production capacity, is the binding constraint. In all three categories, the continent grows enough — it just doesn't refine, mill, or mix enough before the border.

AfCFTA is real but incomplete. The tariff architecture exists; the infrastructure and harmonized standards to use it fully don't — yet. First movers in cross-border logistics and cold-chain corridors get first-mover advantage on margin.

Foreign capital is already circling. Wilmar, Olam Agri, Illovo/ABF, and Eni are not waiting for perfect conditions. The question for African agribusiness and government partners isn't whether outside capital sees the opportunity — it's whether local players capture the value or simply host the infrastructure.

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*Africa Brew Brief will be tracking the AfCFTA rollout's impact on these three trade categories through 2027, alongside continued coverage of cold-chain corridors and processing investment across the continent.*