By quantity, Africa buys more fish than it sells. By value, it sells more than it buys. That single sentence contains one of the more revealing failures in African trade — and it's not a rounding error. It's structural, and it's getting worse.
The Numbers Behind the Paradox
The FAO has tracked this pattern since at least the 1970s. Africa remains a net exporter of fish in value terms even as it is a net importer by volume, and this has held true for decades, with African fish imports rising sharply over the last decade to fill a growing domestic supply gap.
