The Cost of Weak Competition
From grocery mergers to cross-border cartels, how anti-competitive conduct in Africa’s food systems affect prices & livelihoods
First off, thanks for the lovely messages about last week’s issue. It was reassuring to know I wasn’t alone in feeling that way.
Also, my better half pointed out after the issue went out that I missed a golden opportunity to call it “I’m Bringing Foodie Back.” Those who remember (or were around) in the noughties will get the pun.
This week, I’m returning to one of my go-to topics: competition policy, with a specific focus on what’s happening in Africa, the continent with the youngest competition authorities and laws.
This is part of my ongoing attempt to demystify and humanise a topic that can sound technical and nebulous, but which should be a cornerstone of fairer, healthier, and greener food systems.
Competition policy often sounds technical, but in Africa’s food systems, it has real consequences for prices, livelihoods, and who gets to participate in the market. I spoke to Chilufya Sampa to better understand how anti-competitive behaviour plays out across the continent, why so much of it goes undetected, and what are the tangible outcomes of a lack of competition policy.
Chilufya is the former head of the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission in Zambia and a special advisor to the Shamba Centre for Food and Climate, an organisation that is no stranger to Thin Ink (see here and here).
In his role with the latter, he is one of the authors of the Agrifood Anti-Monopoly Tracker that monitors mergers and cases of anti-competitive conduct across Africa’s agriculture and food markets. Launched in December 2024, it uses publicly available information from competition authorities, company disclosures, and media reports, to map where competition enforcement is taking place, and, crucially, where it is not.
The latest edition makes a strong case that anti-competitive conduct in Africa is both widespread and largely invisible.
For example, it finds that more than a third of competition matters reviewed by regulators in the agriculture sector have cross-border impacts, affecting at least 40 neighbouring countries that did not review those cases. As a result, anti-competitive conduct often continues undetected across the continent, disproportionately harming small producers and low-income consumers through higher prices, reduced choice, and restricted market access.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Maybe we can start off with the very generic question. There is relatively little public understanding of anti-competitive behaviour in Africa compared to the US and, to some extent, Europe or the UK. I know it’s really hard to sort of talk in very general terms about a whole continent but based on your experience leading Zambia’s competition authority for over a decade, can you explain the “lay of the land” — how competition regulation works across Africa and what makes it distinct?
A: Sure. Africa was following a kind of a command economy. Compare that to the USA which has been enforcing competition for over 130 years and in Europe, over 60 years, with probably 70 years where a free market economy is in their DNA.
Under the international competition network (ICN), most African competition authorities are actually called young authorities because our competition laws are about 30 years old. I think the oldest is probably 25, 26 years. So we’re still in the process of having this new way of thinking, so to speak, in most African countries.
Now if you looked at our tracker, we say that close to or over 50% of African countries either don’t have a competition policy, a competition law or an institution that will enforce that competition policy, so half of the continent effectively does not have all the ingredients, so to speak, to actually enforce competition law. Either they are missing an authority, a policy, or the law.
There have been great strides made with some competition authorities like the South African, the Kenyan, the Egyptian, and the Zambian authorities, but generally, when you talk about the continent as a whole, the picture is bleak.
When you go to West Africa, Nigeria has a big economy but has a competition law that is less than 10 years old. The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission only came into force, if I’m not mistaken, maybe six to seven years ago. In other parts of West Africa, there are competition provisions or laws at a regional level. But when you go to the individual countries, very few countries have competition laws or policies.
Kenya had a competition law, but it was not the model law with adequate provisions on cartels, abuse of a dominance position of market power and restrictive business practices and consumer protection, the way we know competition to be. The model law was only passed in 2010.
The other thing is that Africa is divided into regional blocks. You have the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), which covers the southern, eastern and northern parts of Africa; the East African Community, which covers eight countries in East Africa; the Southern African Development Community (SADC) which covers most of southern Africa and a few of the island states; and Economic Community Organisation for West Africa States (ECOWAS) in West Africa. Then you have the northern African economic bloc the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU), and there’s one for the Francophone countries, The West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU).
These regional blocs want to become a common market, like the EU, but apart from COMESA, they have not made strides forward. Most are still dealing with, for example, tariffs and haven’t come to common market positions.
So even when you’re dealing with competition laws, it’s being enforced mostly at the national level rather than a regional level. Recently, last November, the East African Community Competition Authority started enforcing at the regional level but they are still finding their feet.
Q: You mentioned some of the countries that are a bit more active than others in terms of having competition policies and authorities. What are some of the biggest constraints they face when it comes to trying to determine, detect, and address anti-competitive behaviour?
A: Based on my experience as well as what we have seen from the tracker, the first and the biggest challenge has been data on markets. Most African countries do not have reliable, efficient data on the markets where they are based: market information on the players and market intelligence and the strategies of the players in the market. Even at a national level that information is lacking.
The Center for Competition, Regulation and Economic Development (CCRED) at the University of Johannesburg, together with the Shamba Centre, has been trying to bridge this gap: trying to come up with the data for competition authorities to use to make informed decisions. When we review some mergers after they have been approved, we’ve seen that decisions were made because regulators didn’t have adequate information on a particular transaction.
The second challenge is resources. Regulators don’t have adequate tools. We’re going digital, yet a lot of authorities do not have the software or the hardware to actually decipher what is going on and use these digital tools that would help them come to a position that would lead to an informed decision.
Lastly, there’s a lack of the competition culture generally by stakeholders. This sort of links to the first question where I was saying that these are new principles. And because of that lack of competition culture, you don’t have stakeholders who will inform the authorities of what is going on. Or even if you do ask them to say, “Hey, there’s this major merger. How is it likely to affect you?”, they do not have appropriate responses because they’re not thinking in terms of the harms such a merger may occasion.
You have NGOs, civil society, and politicians who don’t really know what competition is and what the lack of it would mean to the economy. It’s very, very difficult for an authority to operate in an economy or environment like that.
Q: Just to follow up on that last point, where you talked about this lack of understanding of what competition is, or what is anti-competitive behaviour. When anti-competitive behaviour goes undetected or unpunished, what are the implications? Because while it sounds like a very sort of technical issue, there are real world impacts for both consumers and small business owners, right?
A: Yes, and that’s the unfortunate part. Because if it goes undetected, or unpunished, people will think this is business as usual.
If concentration occurs, and that concentration engages in exclusive deals and arrangements or exploits customers, people will think that is normal. That this is how businesses should operate. If cartels form and engage in price fixing and there is no punishment or enforcement, people will think that (behaviour) is normal.
In fact, I remember that earlier on (in Zambia), when we started investigating the first cartel - it wasn’t in the food market but in the petroleum market - the cartel participants actually admitted and said, “Yes, we’ve set the price.” That shows you the lack of understanding, that this behaviour disadvantages the consumer and anyone else who might want to enter that market, and only advantages you.
There is no way that a new entrant would come in a cartelised market, or a market dominated by a few or a single company. All these things have an impact, because you’re losing investment, the small businesses that you have may end up exiting the market, and they will not even know they’ve been forced out because of anti-competitive conduct. And consumers, when they see their prices go up, they’ll think, “Ah, maybe it’s inflation”, without realising that this is nothing to do with inflation but actually an anti-competitive conduct resulting in the exploitation of consumers.
That affects poverty reduction. We can see this as a chain reaction, because if SMEs leave the market, it means the people lose jobs, and therefore poverty increases. If the prices of the goods are too high, it means less money in people’s pockets, so poverty increases. And, remember, in African cities, food prices are on average more than 30% higher compared with low- and middle-income countries in other parts of the world. So those are the real life implications of anti-competitive behaviour.
Q: That’s really helpful. Thank you. What would you say are the sectors that are most affected by anti-competitive behaviour overall in Africa, and to how significant is this issue within food systems? Does it make up a big chunk of anti-competitive conduct, or is it just one of the many sectors where this happens?
A: Let’s go back again to the first question you asked. We spoke about the fact that most African countries were command economies. They have become a bit more liberalised, and brought in the private sector. But what has happened is that if there was one company in the sugar sector, you still have one company in the sugar sector. Only that this time, it is privately owned. So markets are still highly concentrated generally across the board, and there are very few players in most African countries, with a few exceptions.
Most of those players basically took over what government used to run, and now they’re in private hands.
In the food sector, we have identified that the sub-sectors that have been affected the most are the groceries, followed by beverages, dairy, fruit and vegetables, and then poultry and animal feed. These are the sectors where we’ve seen a lot of either anti-competitive conduct occurring or a lot of concentration happening. We have also observed such conduct in the fertiliser and the vegetable oils sub-sectors as well, but there are not as many concerns as the ones I just mentioned.
Q: I think that’s a good segue to the anti-monopoly tracker that you’ve been working on for a while now. Can you tell us a bit more about it, the analysis that you’ve been doing, what you’re trying to achieve, and what have been the key findings?
A: So we really wanted to track the cases that competition authorities have investigated or reviewed and finalised, and we use open source data. Basically, what’s on competition authorities’ websites or in newspapers. The idea is to highlight cases that authorities recently investigated or reviewed and concluded, and sharing that information with other authorities to see whether they also have similar cases in their jurisdiction.
For example, if we speak about mergers, you may have the same companies that are operating in two countries, but when they decide to merge, they may notify one authority and not the other. So the question is why?
We also wanted to highlight to those countries that do not have authorities or laws that this is what’s happening: this merger was notified in this country and they found it to be anti-competitive. So it’s more likely than not that the same thing is going to happen in your country, but because you do not have an authority, it means you’ve missed the opportunity to stop that conduct, and most likely they are going to engage in that conduct.
Or in a situation where a cartel has been identified as operating in one country, and the same companies are operating in another country. The likelihood of a cartel also occurring in the other country is very, very high.
It’s a question of saying, “Have you seen that the other country has busted a cartel? What are you doing about it?”
In our latest tracker, you will see that COMESA Competition Commission (CCC) actually had a settlement with Heineken because of their anti-competitive conduct: exclusive dealing arrangements, territorial restrictions, and all those things. Heineken is operating in other African countries, outside the COMESA region. So the likelihood of the company engaging in that exact practice is very, very high.
Another cartel was busted by the Competition Commission of South Africa on vegetable oils and one of the companies was the Willowton Group. This company has subsidiaries or influence in other countries like Zambia and Zimbabwe. Yet the Zambian and Zimbabwean Authorities did not take any action.
This means Zambian and Zimbabwean consumers are probably paying higher prices, while in South Africa, the enforcement resulted in a settlement where close to USD 10 million will now be used in public interest initiatives, provision of food products to non-profit groups and procurement from SMEs. So competition enforcement makes a big difference.
Q: Thank you for giving that Heineken example as well, because I was going to ask you for one or two concrete examples. The tracker also suggested that a third of competition matters could have cross border impacts but are not tackled, affecting at least 40 neighbouring countries that did not review the cases. So again, what are the impacts of this gap in the oversight? Are consumers having to pay more? Are companies getting away with whatever they want to do?
A: A merger can lead to a major change in market structure. If you have 10 companies and three of them merge, (the competition) is reduced to seven companies, right? And that gives the remaining companies more market power, or the market becomes highly concentrated. Because of that, the likelihood of anti-competitive conduct increases.
So missing a merger means we are missing an opportunity to actually have a say in the way the market is structured, and especially if you have a remedy, you miss that opportunity to actually influence how the market can operate and make it more competitive. It also gives (the companies) an opportunity to exploit consumers. Your small scale producers may end up exiting the market too, and that is not what you want because most African economies rely on them.
Not reviewing a merge also provides the merged firm or the companies that are remaining an opportunity to entrench themselves. Once they entrench themselves, they can engage in anti-competitive conduct which would ensure that no other company will enter that market. In the recent African Development Poultry Limited with HMH Kuku merger, COMESA was trying, to say, “You shall not engage in exclusive dealings and arrangements.” They were forewarning them from doing such a thing so that it allows other competitors to enter into the poultry market.
Enforcing an abuse of dominance after it has occurred is more strenuous than doing it beforehand.
Q: Speaking of mergers, one of the things the analysis noted in that there is a rise in terms of mergers in the grocery retail sector. Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen news about greedflation and price fixing in the United States, where the grocery sector is extremely concentrated. Can you explain what is happening in Africa in terms of this sector? What’s driving this trend?
A: The analysis spoke more of what is happening in South Africa, but the same supermarket chain stores are elsewhere as well. These stores have become an important market for consumers to get their food, groceries, and everything else. The setup or the strategy of a chain store is that they are able to negotiate very low prices with the suppliers and then pass that down on to consumers because of their bulk purchases.
However, if they stop competing because of mergers, they will still negotiate very good prices with the manufacturers, but will they pass on those benefits to the consumers, especially if they have become a very important outlet for consumers to purchase their everyday food?
Over the years, these stores have gained importance in their role as a transit place from the farm up to the table. They are now basically controlling the entire value chain and because of this, there is a possibility of them engaging in anti-competitive conduct with the manufacturers, and at the same time disadvantaging the consumers by giving them anti-competitive pricing. So we are saying competition authorities should watch out for that.
We may have a situation where you have highly concentrated markets and consumers or farmers have nowhere to go. In Kenya, as a result of supermarket chains not paying small scale enterprises, they had to actually pass a law on buyer power. The Competition Authority of Kenya is currently enforcing this law.
Q: That’s really interesting because a lot of the time when competition authorities look at mergers or anti-competitive behaviour, the focus is on consumer welfare and there’s less scrutiny of upstream impacts. I just have one more question. Based on your experience and the findings from the anti-monopoly tracker, what would make the biggest difference in terms of closing this oversight gap?
A: The African Union, under the African Continental Free Trade Area, has set up a secretariat and there is a competition protocol. Essentially the idea is to have a continental competition authority because they recognise the fact that not all member states are keen to pass competition law, or even have a policy. So they passed this competition protocol which recognises regional laws and authorities as building blocks for the continental body.
First and foremost, advocacy is very, very important. You need to let all stakeholders know that it is important to have competition law. It’s not just about governments, it’s also about civil society, NGOs, and consumers understanding it.
Secondly, we need a policy and legal framework with an institution that is going to enforce it at national level. Not every conduct can be captured at the regional level so you need a national enforcement body.
The strength of the regional body depends on the ability of the national body, since it will always go back to the national authority to get feedback or data.
So you can see that the building blocks really need to start from the national level, then it goes to the regional, and then to the continental. However, I’m also aware that sometimes it is good to have a push from the regional or the continental level.
Thin’s Pickings
Good analyses on/in response to America’s new Dietary Guidelines
Believe me when I say I’m as tired as the next person that the global news cycle and coverage revolve around what’s happening in the U.S. of A. Unfortunately the new guidelines are a big deal and the impacts of an American diet won’t be limited to within its borders. So here goes:
Marion Nestle’s Food Politics should be your first port of call. She has been providing short and sharp insights on the guidelines, expanding from the initial verdict (“Cheerful, Muddled, Contradictory, Ideological, Retro”) to how they are about personal responsibility and not public health, the committee members’ blatant conflicts of interest, the misguided emphasis on meat, the lack of clarity over alcohol consumption, and some final thoughts.
Helena Bottemiller Evich’s Food Fix is another good source. Some articles are behind a paywall but there are enough free articles.
This handy explainer from Raychel Santo at World Resources Institute on how not all proteins are created equal and which have the lightest footprint.
Emily Atkin’s observant take - as usual - asks an important question: If a nation’s diet requires ecological destruction to sustain it, can it really be called healthy?
The World Is in the Midst of an ‘Extreme’ Temperature Spike - Bloomberg
“Last year was the third hottest on record, according to an analysis of temperature data released Wednesday by three independent agencies,” behind 2024 and 2023, Eric Roston reports. “What makes this result extraordinary, scientists say, is that 2025 saw a cooling phase in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, or La Niña, that suppresses global temperatures.”
Ten humanitarian trends to keep an eye on in 2026 - The New Humanitarian
“From resurgent HIV to the global gender backlash, from deal-making replacing peacemaking to migration in a time of far-right populism, here are some of the key trends our editors are forecasting to shape humanitarian needs in 2026.”
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