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National food production cannot address nutrient gaps in African countries

Nature Food (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

This study quantifies nine key nutrient gaps by comparing national demand and domestic production in each of Africa’s 54 countries. While different countries exhibited varying degrees of nutrient gaps for different nutrients, all countries were deficient in at least one nutrient, with eight being deficient in all nutrients. Based on current agricultural productivity, only seven African nations would be able to satisfy their nutrient gaps through production expansion given water and land constraints.

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Fig. 1: Nutrient deficiency rates for African countries based on national food production and nutrient requirements.
Fig. 2: Potential reduction rate under national blue water and land constraints in African countries.

Data availability

Food production data are publicly available from FAOSTAT (https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QCL). Population data are available at https://population.un.org/wpp/downloads. Information on the nutrient content of food is available at http://www.ars.usda.gov/ba/bhnrc/ndl and in ref. 36. Information on RNIs is available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30844154 and in refs. 38,39.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2023YFE0113000), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (72074136, 72522023, 72104129, 72033005), the Taishan Scholar Youth Expert Program of Shandong Province (tsqn202103020, tsqnz20221106), and Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation (ZR2024MG008, ZR2023QG002).

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Harold L. Feukam Nzudie, Xu Zhao.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Blue and Green Development, Shandong University, Weihai, China

    Harold L. Feukam Nzudie, Xu Zhao, Peipei Tian, Shuyi Chen, Honglin Zhong & Ning Zhang

  2. School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Pan He

  3. Business School, Shandong University, Weihai, China

    Xinxin Zhang

  4. College of Environment, Hohai University, Nanjing, China

    Amar A. Hamad

  5. water@leeds, School of Civil Engineering, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Martin R. Tillotson

  6. African Natural Resources Mangement & Investment Centre, African Development Bank, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire

    Innocent Onah

  7. Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Kuishuang Feng

  8. School of Economics, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea

    Ning Zhang

  9. Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Ning Zhang

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  1. Harold L. Feukam Nzudie
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Contributions

X. Zhao and P.T. designed this study. H.L.F.N., P.T. and S.C. performed the analysis and prepared the paper. X. Zhao, P.T. and N.Z. coordinated and supervised the project. All authors (H.L.F.N., X. Zhao, P.T., P.H., X. Zhang, A.A.H., M.R.T., I.O., S.C., H.Z., K.F. and N.Z.) contributed to writing and reviewing the paper.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Xu Zhao, Peipei Tian or Ning Zhang.

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Nature Food thanks Ozge Geyik, Marco Pastori and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Methods, Figs. 1–8 and Tables 1–3.

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Feukam Nzudie, H.L., Zhao, X., Tian, P. et al. National food production cannot address nutrient gaps in African countries. Nat Food (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-025-01246-4

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