The AfCFTA Secretariat, in a recent report entitled The Futures Report 2021: Which Value Chains for a Made in Africa Revolution, identified certain industrial sectors and sub-sectors as potential candidates for value chain development under the AfCFTA agreement. The broad sectors included in their list were agricultural/agro-processing, textiles and leather, automotive, pharmaceuticals, mobile financial services and cultural industries.

This Trade Brief looks at the broadly-defined agricultural/agro-processing/agri-business sector in Africa^[1], from the perspective of the regional and global value chain dimensions. The intention is to present the basic value chain metrics of the sector, including gender-disaggregated employment metrics, as a precursor to several more extensive studies forthcoming from tralac over the next few months.

^[1] Due to differences in aggregating sectoral industrial data, the sector has been defined as ‘the broadly-defined agricultural/agro-processing/agri-business sector’. The aggregate contains data for agricultural production; agri-business production, defined as ‘economic activities derived from or connected to farm products’ (BBVA, 2022) and agro-processing, defined as ‘the sub-sector of the manufacturing that beneficiates primary materials and intermediate goods from agricultural, fisheries and forestry based sectors’ (DTIC, 2022).

Readers are encouraged to quote and reproduce this material for educational, non-profit purposes, provided the source is acknowledged. All views and opinions expressed remain solely those of the authors and do not purport to reflect the views of tralac.