Drought pushing food prices up sharply in East Africa

25 April 2017

Drought throughout East Africa has sharply curbed harvests and pushed the prices of cereals and other staple foods to unusually high levels, posing a heavy burden to households and special risks for pastoralists in the region, according to the latest Food Price Monitoring and Analysis Bulletin from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

Local prices of maize, sorghum and other cereals are near or at record levels in large areas of Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Uganda and Tanzania.

“Rising food prices can have very diverse effects on households, depending on their net position towards food markets as well as on the distribution of households around the poverty threshold,” Boubaker Ben-Belhassen, Director of the Trade and Markets Division at the FAO, told The Source.

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Source: The Source Magazine, International Water Association