REFILE-West African food trade under strain as COVID-19 shuts borders

(Fixes typo in paragraph two)
* Traders see up to 30% losses due to COVID-19 restrictions
* Goods spoil as border closures disrupt food transport
* Trade frictions could contribute to food crisis - U.N.

By Aaron Ross
DAKAR, May 27 (Reuters) - In ordinary times, it takes
Boureima Diawara two or three days to truck his mangoes the
1,200 km (745 miles) from southern Mali to Senegal's seaside
capital Dakar.
But since coronavirus restrictions came in, some shipments
have taken more than twice as long. After struggling with border
delays and a dusk-to-dawn curfew in Senegal, Diawara's workers
have ending up dumping sacks of rotten fruit in landfill.
Trading across borders in West Africa, with its rutted roads
and bribe-hungry police, has never been easy. But restrictions
imposed by governments in response to COVID-19 are crippling the
trade in perishable goods and livestock like never before,
according to commercial data and interviews with traders.
"If the trucks stop, the produce spoils," said Diawara,
whose traders' collective slashed the number of trucks it runs
to Dakar from up to nine a day to only one or two.
The breakdowns in trade are contributing to fears of a
spiralling food crisis. The United Nations says the pandemic
could cause the number of West Africans living in food
insecurity to double to 43 million in the next six months.
While some countries have been able to rely on healthy
pre-crisis stocks to keep the price of staples such as maize and
rice relatively stable, more time-sensitive supply chains are
fraying and legions of independent traders are taking the hit.
Data collected by the Permanent Interstate Committee for
Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS) shows West African traders
of perishable produce and livestock have seen losses of 10% to
30% since health restrictions came in, as transport is disrupted
and markets close while illegal tax collection at checkpoints
has leapt nearly 50%.
A separate survey by Réseau Billital Maroobé, a collective
of West African herders, showed economic activities were at a
standstill for 42% of herders in the region as of last week.

The impact is not universal and some trade corridors have
been less affected. But Brahima Cisse, a regional markets expert
at CILSS, which has 13 member states and is based in Burkina
Faso, said he had never before seen such broad-based losses.
"There is an entire disorganisation of the market that makes
the impact unprecedented," said Cisse. "People in rural areas
don't even know where to go to sell their products to survive."

INFORMAL TRADE
Much of West Africa's food trade is conducted by small-scale
traders hauling anything from sacks of yams to chickens, onions
and bananas aboard public transport, or driving herds of cattle
across borders.
Because of smuggling and patchy customs records, the vast
majority of the commerce does not show up in official
statistics, researchers say.
That informality makes it especially vulnerable to
coronavirus restrictions, even when governments carve out
exemptions for trade, said Antoine Bouet, a senior research
fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute.
"Very often, these measures consist in the screening of
trucks crossing the border while movement of people is
forbidden," he said. "These measures stop informal trade of
small quantities."
Mauritania closed its border with Senegal, the main market
for its livestock, in March. While merchandise is officially
exempted, herders have not been allowed to move their animals
across the border, Mauritania's agriculture ministry said.
Traders on the other side of the continent face delays and
blockages too.
Last week, the East African Grain Council said cargo volumes
into some inland countries had fallen by more than half with
tailbacks at the border between Kenya and Uganda stretching more
than 50 km.
Certain corridors have been less affected. In Ivory Coast,
the busiest route from the West African coast to interior,
transporters have encountered few delays, said Ibrahim Diallo,
an official with the national transporters' association.
In recent weeks, some governments have started to ease
restrictions in an effort to reduce the economic toll, including
reopening some markets and shortening curfews.
Atsuko Toda, the African Development Bank's director of
agricultural finance and rural development, praised governments
for eschewing policies like export restrictions that fuelled
price spikes during the 2007-08 food crisis.
But traders remain anxious as they settle in for what the
World Health Organization says could be a prolonged outbreak on
the continent, even though it has so far avoided the exponential
growth in cases and deaths elsewhere in the world.
For traders in Benin, the new coronavirus restrictions are
simply compounding their pain, after neighbouring Nigeria closed
its border in August to crack down on smuggling.
Benin's government has now shut its four land borders in
response to COVID-19 and while they remain open to commerce,
traders say health checks have significantly slowed crossings.

"The security forces have complicated the checks and
everyone is scared," said Bella Agbessi, who exports pineapples
to Togo. "I'm afraid we won't be able to hold on for long."