The African Continental Export-Import Bank Afreximbank of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) recently launched a digital platform for the joint purchase of food and agricultural inputs to avoid a food crisis on the continent, based on the war in Ukraine.
Denominated Africa Trade Exchange (ATEX), technological innovation, which has the support of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, was created as a starting point the experience gained with the Covid-19 pandemic, in which the African Union (AU) added the purchase of material to combat the disease in the African Vaccine Procurement Platform (AVAT), as well as following the African Development Bank's US$1,5 billion emergency food production plan.
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The digital platform, reports the statement from UNECA, has as its main objective to bring together in the same service the purchase of food and agricultural inputs, at lower prices, ensuring at the same time that countries with limited resources and difficult access to the international market are not left behind.
"Faced with a new crisis, Africa must build on past experience to rebuild itself once more. The Covid-19 experience has shown that organized demand pooling can overcome supply chain challenges and deliver much-needed goods at competitive prices“, can be read in the note.
It should also be noted that the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa recalls that the Russia-Ukraine crisis “increased pressure on supply chains“, with the expected increases in prices of agricultural products and production factors, such as cereals and fertilizers. This, in turn, put pressure on thedomestic production, sometimes fragile, of several African countries, which depend on these supply chains for basic products", some of which depend on the "imports for wheat consumption up to 80%, for example".
ATEX also comes to facilitate, whenever possible, joint procurement by African buyers from African suppliers, as in the case of fertilizers; and from outside the continent, when necessary, as in the case of cereals and grains, thus contributing to the creation of new continental supply chains that insulate Africans from the volatility that has characterized recent years.
