I started in Agriculture because I wondered what better way to help people is there, than dignity? How can people lower in the pyramid make better decisions? What I found was that there is a remarkable correlation between hunger and conflict…
Every capital allocator who has looked at African agriculture in the past decade has run the same mental model. High potential. High risk. The crop loss and market disconnection that frustrates most investors is real; but it’s a system failure, not a continent failure. Political instability. Weak institutions. Currency exposure. The spreadsheet says yes, but the risk committee says wait.
What almost none of them do is run the comparison in the other direction. Not “how risky is West Africa?” but “how exposed is the alternative?”
Nobody runs the comparison in the other direction
Before February 2022, the Black Sea corridor supplied a large share of the wheat and maize that moved in international trade. Ukraine and Russia together moved grain to North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia at scale, through ports that had operated without major disruption for decades. Risk committees were comfortable; markets priced the corridor as stable. Then a naval blockade trapped a season of grain behind a war zone, and the deficit triggered a food price crisis that reached every import-dependent nation on earth.
The Red Sea crisis of late 2023 compounded the problem. Shipping routes that connected Asian and Middle Eastern buyers to global grain markets added weeks of transit time and substantial cost. As a result, insurance premiums spiked. Vessels rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope. The “low-risk” corridors turned out to be concentrated, exposed, and fragile in exactly the ways that risk models failed to price.
No region on earth is conflict-free
In short, this is the context against which we should evaluate West Africa’s geography. Not against an abstract risk-free benchmark that doesn’t exist. Against the corridors it would replace or diversify.
Ghana sits on the Gulf of Guinea. Tema and Takoradi ports access Atlantic shipping lanes that do not transit the Suez Canal, the Bab el-Mandeb strait, the Turkish straits, or any of the chokepoints that have disrupted global grain trade in the past four years. A vessel from Tema reaches Jeddah and Rotterdam in comparable time. These routes are operationally active, commercially established, and geographically remote from every conflict zone that has interrupted grain supply since 2020.
West Africa is not conflict-free. No region on earth is. But the specific geography relevant to agricultural corridor infrastructure, the coastal belt from Senegal through Ghana, is structurally removed from the instability corridors that dominate risk perception of the continent. The Sahel crisis is real. It is also several hundred kilometres north of the grain-producing regions and port infrastructure that a corridor project would use. Conflating Sahelian instability with coastal West African commercial infrastructure is an analytical error that misallocates capital at continental scale.
What conflict-remote means in practice
The sovereign buyers who matter most understand this distinction already. When Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Environment, Water and Agriculture toured West Africa in May 2024, the visit was not an expression of hope. It was a procurement diversification signal from a government that watched its supply lines degrade through the Black Sea, saw transit costs spike through the Red Sea, and concluded that geographic concentration in grain sourcing is a sovereign vulnerability. The policy response is to build supply relationships in corridors that are not correlated with the conflicts disrupting existing supply.
This is what conflict-remote means in practice. Not the absence of all risk. The absence of correlation with the specific risks that have already materialized in competing corridors. A grain shipment from Ghana does not transit a war zone. It does not pass through a strait where commercial vessels face military interdiction. It does not depend on diplomatic arrangements between hostile states for port access. These are not theoretical advantages. They are operational realities that became financially material when the Black Sea closed and the Red Sea became contested.
Geography is infrastructure
The capital allocation implication is straightforward. West African agricultural infrastructure is not a frontier bet that requires risk tolerance. It is a diversification play that reduces portfolio exposure to the geographic concentration that has already produced losses. In other words, the risk is not in building the corridor. The risk is in remaining dependent on corridors that have demonstrated fragility under exactly the conditions sovereign buyers must hedge against.
Geography is not destiny. But it is infrastructure. And in a global grain market that geographic chokepoints have disrupted three times in four years, a corridor that avoids all of them is not a risk to be managed. It is a feature to be priced.
This is part of a periodic series on the design principles behind integrated agricultural corridors. Published on nadiazeine.com/insights.
Nadia Zeine is Managing Partner and CEO of Africa Private Development Corporation, ‘APDC’ Holdings.
Food Systems · Infrastructure · West Africa
Related reading: Storage. The right entry point for the Corridor creation.