Hidden Middle, Part 1: a quiet revolution in the private sector shaping food environments and diets in Africa

[Target audience: peers and younger researchers interested in food systems, development, and global health]

Disclaimers: Views my own and I welcome feedback.

The Hidden Middle report, published in 2019 by Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) is a comprehensive guide and status report of agri-businesses shaping value chains and ultimately food environments and diets (and health outcomes) in Africa – and this includes both rural and urban areas. The report is written in bullet points and short paragraphs, with plenty of key messages to help the reader. It was so good, I ended up highlighting almost the entire report.

The “hidden middle” refers to the role of small and medium enterprises (SME) in transport, warehousing, cold chain, and logistics, and the vital role they play in maintaining food supply. They are often “hidden from the policy and developmental debate”. The authors estimate that 80-90% of the food supply in Africa is done through SME, while the remaining 10-20% is done through the modern system of supermarkets and large processors, mostly based in South Africa.

I found a cute analogy comparing SME and large firms: “Africa is characterized by a few “elephants” (large but slow-growing firms that provide little employment growth), many “mice” (micro and small firms with rapid “churning”, entering and exiting the industry and hence not contributing greatly to net growth (Li and Rama, 2015)”.

Speaking of elephants, I have outlined key takeaways that stood out to me – similar to a Tamil proverb about describing an elephant blindfolded. I am trying to connect the dots with relevant ongoing research and larger drivers, and I welcome your perspective.

The rapid rise of SMEs occurred because (taken verbatim from the report):

1. Diets “commercialized” in rural areas. [See this 7 min presentation by Dr.Stella Nordhagen on how these products are available in rural mining towns in Guinea]
2. There has been a rapid rise in processed food consumption in both rural and urban areas. (Tschirley, Reardon, Dolislager, & Snyder, 2015)
3. Increase in public infrastructure investments (roads, ports, electricity, communications).
4. The rise in secondary towns. A corollary to the infrastructure driver has been the rapid development of rural towns, tertiary and secondary cities in proximity to crop and animal production zones. These secondary urban areas are important nodes in value chains, and form some 60% of urban Africa (Christiaensen, De Weerdt, & Todo, 2013; Tschirley, Haggblade, & Reardon, 2013)
5. Urbanization drove rapid growth in rural-urban food value chains
6. Falling imported machine prices, as China and India exported small-scale farm machines to Africa and other developing regions. [A side note, in all of 80 villages of the EFFECTS trial in Mara, Tanzania that I am part of, we found that all had maize milling/grinding machines bought from Chinese firms, and this was collectively financed by the village.]

The report illustrates several cases of how SME shaped food supply with the following examples: (1) teff supply chain in Ethiopia, (2) chicken feed in Nigeria, and (3) grains/processed food in Tanzania. The chicken feed story in Nigeria is particularly striking – because of SMEs and large firms increasing access to chicken feed, farmers were able to meet the growing demand for animal-source protein. [Side note: this is why global health nutritionists/researchers should care about fertilizer/feed value chains and agricultural labor in addition to the food supply chain].

Shifting diets at a large scale in a small time frame is going to change the nutrient profiles of a population, which as past studies have shown can alter the effectiveness of the nutrition interventions, whether it’s micronutrient– or food-based ^a .

Stay tuned for part 2: I will present flashback storytime on structural drivers of food choice and food environment in Tanzania relating to this report!

^a For some context, there was an egg study in Ecuador where they found a huge difference in linear growth among children who were given an egg daily for 6 months. This study was replicated in Malawi but they did not find any effect on linear growth among children. One of the possible reasons the results were not replicable (besides a false-positive), is that baseline differences in nutrient profiles of these children are really different. In Malawi, kids had a lot of animal source protein in their diet because of availability of fish, which was not the case the in Ecuador.