Intra-regional Food Trade in West Africa

Intra-regional Food Trade in West Africa: New Evidence, New Perspectives introduces a pioneering approach to measuring and understanding food trade within the region. This report is the first to combine official statistics with innovative data on unrecorded trade flows for over 130 food products, revealing that the annual value of intra-regional food trade exceeds USD 10 billion annually-six times higher than officially reported. This new evidence challenges long-standing assumptions that regional trade is marginal or informal, instead uncovering a dynamic, long-distance system that is critical to food security, agricultural transformation and regional integration. As urbanisation and rising incomes lead to growing and diversifying food demand in West Africa, the report provides policymakers, development partners and private sector actors with a unique evidence base to help them leverage the transformative potential of intra-regional food trade more effectively. It calls for a shift in prevailing narratives, the regionalisation of food sovereignty agendas through trade, moving beyond basic trade facilitation towards comprehensive promotion, and investment in stronger, harmonised regional trade data systems.