Food inflation: when eating becomes a luxury

In July 2024, Nigeria's food inflation reached 39.5%, nearly double the country's general inflation rate. Behind this figure lies a societal shift: in a country where households already spend most of their budget on food, an increase of this magnitude does not erode comfort, it reduces the number of meals. Food inflation is not just another macroeconomic variable. It is the price of the daily meal, and when it doubles, eating ceases to be an acquired right and becomes a trade-off. The question posed to West Africa is therefore not whether its economies will disinflate, but how many households will have durably reduced the quantity and quality of their plate before that happens.

A two-speed shock: the CFA dividing line

West African food inflation does not speak with a single voice. It draws a sharp, almost monetary, fault line. On one side, the naira zone, where Nigeria saw its general inflation reach 33.2% in 2024 and its food inflation peak at 39.5%. On the other, the CFA franc zone, pegged to the euro, which contained the increase far better: 1.2% in Benin, 1.5% in Senegal, 2.1% in Mali over the same year. Between the two, Ghana, outside the CFA zone, occupies an uncomfortable intermediate position, with 22.8% general inflation. This dispersion, a ratio of more than 1 to 27 between Benin and Nigeria, does not follow the map of harvests or rainfall. It follows that of exchange-rate regimes and dependence on imports. This is a lesson in itself: in a region integrated through the food trade, the same bag of rice costs a fortune on one side of a border and remains affordable on the other, depending on the currency in which it is paid.

Nigeria, the epicentre: anatomy of a 39.5% peak

Understanding the West African crisis means first understanding Nigeria, which alone concentrates most of the shock. Between February and July 2024, food inflation there rose from 37.9% to 39.5%, a historic high. Then, just as spectacularly, it receded: 23.5% in February 2025, 16.9% in September, 13.1% in October. This rapid disinflation does not mean prices are falling, but that they are ceasing to climb as fast, from an already very high level. The damage is done: a household that has seen the price of its rice almost double in a year does not recover its purchasing power because the increase is slowing. The methodological lesson is important, because it shapes public action: citing "Nigeria's food inflation" without specifying the reference month is meaningless. It is a curve, not a figure, and it is the trajectory, not the peak, that should guide social safety nets.

The first driver: when the currency collapses, the plate is paid in dollars

The main accelerator of the Nigerian shock has a name: the depreciation of the naira. Between January 2024 and May 2025, the currency went from around 950 to nearly 1,595 naira to the dollar, a loss of value of roughly two thirds. Yet a vital share of West African food is paid for in foreign currency, because it is imported. Every naira lost against the dollar mechanically raises the cost of wheat, rice and oil bought on world markets, then feeds through to the local market stall. This is the central mechanism of the crisis: food inflation is not only a harvest problem, it is an exchange-rate problem. Where the currency holds, as in the CFA zone, this channel stays closed; where it collapses, it transmits global volatility directly into household baskets.

Where the currency collapses, food inflation ceases to be a matter of harvest: it becomes the price of import dependence, settled in foreign currency the household does not have.

The second driver: a structural dependence on imports

If the exchange rate hits so hard, it is because the foundation is fragile: West Africa does not produce enough of what it eats. Senegal offers the clearest illustration. Rice is the staple food there, but local production covers only about 35% of needs; the remaining 65% is imported, exposed to world prices and freight costs. Nigeria, for its part, imported some 4.7 million tonnes of wheat in 2024-2025, the second-largest item on its food bill, at around 2 billion dollars. This dependence turns every external shock, price increases, logistical strain, currency depreciation, into domestic inflation. As long as the basic basket depends so heavily on the outside world, no country in the region truly controls the price of its plate.

The third driver: the hidden cost of transport and supply chains

A third mechanism, often overlooked, completes the explanation of the shock: the price of food is not only the price of grain, it is also the price of getting it there. According to the World Bank, the rising cost of transport and supply chains pushed food costs up by 45% or more in Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea and Nigeria. Degraded roads, more expensive fuel, logistical disruptions: each link adds its own surcharge between the field or the port and the market. This factor explains why food inflation also affects countries where the currency holds: even when grain is available and affordable to import, it arrives expensive for the final consumer. It is a reminder that food security is decided as much in logistics as in production.

Three drivers, then, that combine and amplify one another: currency depreciation, dependence on imports and the cost of supply chains. None is a climatic inevitability. All stem from public policy, from exchange-rate management to agricultural and road investment. This is what makes the crisis both serious and, in part, reversible. This distinction is essential for action: a drought is endured, an exchange-rate regime is steered, a rice sector is built, a logistics corridor is developed. Recognising that food inflation is largely the product of economic choices, and not simply a whim of the skies, is already to reject fatalism and to restore to the decision-maker the responsibility, and therefore the power, to act on the price of the plate.

What averages hide: inflation hits the poor first

A national inflation rate is an average, and averages anaesthetise reality. The decisive figure is not the index, it is the share of the budget that food devours. In West Africa, households devote an average of 55% of their spending to it, and up to 69% for the poorest quintile in countries with high food spending. In other words, the same food inflation does not weigh at all the same depending on income: for a well-off household spending 20% of its budget on food, a 10% increase erodes 2 points of purchasing power; for a poor household devoting 69% to it, it erodes nearly 7. Food inflation is, by construction, the most regressive tax there is. And the general index, by mixing all categories, dilutes precisely that violence.

To this disadvantage is added another, this one regional: at comparable income levels, food prices in sub-Saharan Africa are already 30 to 40% higher than in the rest of the world. The starting point is therefore higher, and inflation adds to a structural expensiveness. The modest West African household thus suffers a double penalty: it devotes a disproportionate share of its income to eating, and it pays for its food more dearly than its counterpart on another continent at the same standard of living. This surcharge is explained by the combination of factors already mentioned, weak local production, transport cost, market fragmentation, but it carries a clear political consequence: reducing inflation is not enough, the high level of prices itself must also be tackled, on pain of leaving households trapped in a permanent expensiveness that variation indices, by construction, never measure.

The cost of inaction: from rising prices to hunger

When eating becomes a luxury, the consequence is not abstract, it has a face. Severe food insecurity already affects 24.3% of the population in Nigeria and 15% in Benin. In all, 31.8 million Nigerians are in acute food insecurity, a situation worsened by the removal of fuel subsidies, which raised transport and input costs. These figures reflect an implacable chain: each point of food inflation pushes households to reduce first the quality of meals, then their number. Yet what is taken today from a child's plate is paid for over decades, in stunted growth, curtailed learning capacities, lost human capital. The cost of inaction is not read only in the statistics of the current year, but in the potential of a generation.

Undernourishment, a more structural measure, confirms the diagnosis. It reaches 19.9% of the population in Nigeria, 14.3% in Benin, 13.1% in Burkina Faso. These levels are not the product of a single bad year: they describe a base of vulnerability upon which food inflation strikes. When a population already has one inhabitant in five in chronic caloric deficit, a price shock does not carve out mere discomfort, it tips households on the edge into crisis. This is why food inflation must be read not in isolation, but overlaid on the map of pre-existing hunger.

Poverty, the amplifying ground of the shock

Food inflation does not fall on neutral ground: it meets mass poverty that multiplies its effects. Niger has the highest extreme poverty rate in the region, 60.5% of its population living on less than 2.15 dollars a day, followed by Burkina Faso (42.1%) and Nigeria (41.8%). For these households, there is no savings, no buffer, no room for substitution: when the price of grain rises, the only adjustment variable is the quantity eaten. It is this intersection, high inflation over deep poverty, that makes the Nigerian situation so explosive, and that threatens Niger despite contained nominal inflation. The same point of food inflation does not have the same meaning in Cotonou and in Zinder, because the absorption capacity of households is radically different there.

Gender: women on the front line of the basket crisis

A final angle, often absent from macroeconomic tables, deserves to be raised: food inflation has a gender dimension. In most West African households, it is women who manage the supply, the preparation of meals and the daily arbitration of the food budget. It is therefore they who, in practice, absorb the shock: longer hours at the market in search of the best price, reduction of their own ration in favour of the children, increased recourse to informal credit. Yet the sex-disaggregated data that would make it possible to measure and target this impact is largely lacking. Without it, social safety nets remain blind to the woman who, in the home, first bears the increase. This is a challenge that CRAD knows well, having taken it up in the energy sector with the regional WOCEWA project, and which applies just as much to food.

• Exchange rate before harvest. In the naira zone, currency depreciation (from 950 to 1,595 NGN/USD) is the leading driver of food inflation, ahead of agricultural hazards; the stability of the CFA has, conversely, protected household plates.
• Dependence imports inflation. When local production covers only 35% of rice needs, as in Senegal, the price of the basic basket becomes a hostage to world prices and freight.
• Logistics makes everything more expensive. The cost of transport and supply chains added 45% or more to food prices in several countries, including where the currency holds.
• Regressivity is the real scandal. At 55% of the budget on average and 69% for the poorest, food inflation is the most unjust tax, one that the national index masks.

The CRAD angle: measure the real basket, not just the index

All this analysis converges on a methodological conviction. A national inflation rate is a tool for macroeconomic comparison, it is not an instrument for social targeting. It says that a country is suffering, it says neither who is suffering, nor where, nor by how much. To act with precision, one must descend to the level of the household and the real basket: cross the price series of the major portals (World Bank, FAO GIEWS) with field consumption surveys, disaggregated by region, by income quintile and by sex. It is this granularity that makes it possible to know that 1.7% inflation in Niger, against a backdrop of 60.5% extreme poverty, can be more dangerous than 22.8% in Ghana for a more resilient middle class.

This is precisely the chain that CRAD carries, from African field data to the decision-makers' dashboard. Mapping real-basket inflation by area and by household category means transforming an abstract national index into an operational roadmap: targeting cash transfers where severe food insecurity is progressing fastest, sizing subsidies at the right level, and directing agricultural investment towards the sectors that will tomorrow reduce dependence on imports. Without this fine measurement, the public response sprays without targeting, and spends without protecting those who are tipping over.

1.7% inflation over 60% poverty can do more harm than 22.8% over a middle class. The national index does not say so; the field survey does.

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