Two facts from the same year. Côte d'Ivoire shipped 271,000 tonnes of bananas in 2025, more than a third of everything Africa exported, and became the fourth supplier of the European market. In the same months, the Tunisian ministry of commerce was setting ceiling prices on bananas, 5 dinars a kilo for Egyptian fruit and 7 for other origins, while inspectors seized stock sold above the cap.

One African country has more bananas than its buyers can absorb. Another is rationing them by decree. Between the two there is a sea, four days of sailing, and nobody running the route.

The usual explanation is money. It is the wrong explanation, and repeating it costs us a decade.

What actually stands between the two markets

Tunisia taxes bananas at 100 percent and licenses the imports. That is a policy, and policies change when someone shows up with volume, a price and a calendar. What nobody shows up with is the route: a reefer flow that leaves Abidjan on a fixed day, arrives at a fixed temperature, and lands the same quality every fortnight for a year.

Fruit does not wait for a project to be structured. It ripens. A banana that misses its vessel becomes local market fruit at a third of the price, and after two more days it becomes waste. The FAO puts losses on fruit and vegetables at up to 45 percent in developing markets, and the figure is not an accident of nature. It is the arithmetic of missing cold rooms, missing schedules and roads that turn a six hour run into a two day one.

So the banana stays home, the Tunisian buyer calls Ecuador, and both countries pay for the same missing link.

The same story with tomatoes

Nigeria harvests around 3.9 million tonnes of tomatoes a year and loses close to 45 percent of that harvest before it reaches a processor. The country then imports more than 400,000 tonnes of tomato paste, at a cost that trade estimates put between 350 and 400 million dollars a year. Nigeria is, on paper, one of the largest tomato producers in Africa and the largest importer of tomato paste in the world.

Read those two sentences again. The fruit exists. The demand exists, so strongly that the country pays hard currency for it in tins. What does not exist is the forty kilometres of cold chain and the processing capacity between a field in Kano and a factory gate.

And with onions

Senegal produces more than 400,000 tonnes of onions against a national demand of about 380,000. On those numbers the country is self sufficient. It is not. Storage capacity stands at roughly 170,000 tonnes, and studies of the sector record losses of 20 to 40 percent after three to six months in the storage that exists.

So the harvest arrives all at once, prices collapse, farmers sell at a loss, and by the dry months the stock is gone. Senegal suspended onion imports in January 2025 to protect its growers, then authorised imports again from 19 September to 31 December to refill empty shelves. In 2024 the country had imported 177,803 tonnes of onions worth 39 million dollars, almost 90 percent of it from the Netherlands.

The Netherlands has no advantage in growing onions. It has an advantage in keeping them.

The financing argument does not survive contact with the facts

Every conversation on this subject arrives at the same sentence: there is no money for this in Africa.

In December 2025 a ship left the new port of Morebaya in Guinea with 200,000 tonnes of iron ore for China. Behind that shipment sits a 650 kilometre railway and a deep water port, part of an infrastructure programme costed above 20 billion dollars, funded by Chinese state banks, commercial banks and the mining companies themselves.

Twenty billion dollars found their way to a mountain in the forest region of Guinea. A cold room in Kaolack costs a rounding error on that number.

The institutions are not hiding either. Afreximbank has been building trade and distribution platforms whose stated purpose is to aggregate supply from small producers and organise warehousing and logistics around it. BADEA and the Islamic Development Bank finance agricultural infrastructure across the same member states. Coris, Ecobank and the other regional banks lend against contracts every week of the year.

What these institutions do not do is invent the project. They wait for a file.

What a file looks like, and why so few exist

A financier reading a request for a cold chain investment is looking for six things, and most requests contain one.

The offtake, first. Not a letter of intent, a signed commitment from a buyer with a volume and a price formula. Tunisia's importers, Morocco's supermarkets, the Gulf traders who already buy Egyptian fruit.

The volume calendar, second. What leaves, in what weeks, at what quality. Fruit is seasonal and the money has to be repaid in the weeks when nothing ships.

The technical specification, third. Temperature, transit time, packing, the number of reefer plugs at the port and who owns the containers.

The loss baseline, fourth. What is being lost today, in tonnes and in money. This is the number that makes the investment obvious, and almost nobody measures it.

An operator, fifth. A named company that will run the trucks, the cold rooms and the paperwork, with references that can be checked.

And a route, sixth. The actual itinerary, the border posts, the transit regime, the documents, the timings.

Assemble those six and the money is not the hard part. Skip them and no amount of goodwill from Cairo, Jeddah or Khartoum will help, because a development bank cannot approve a project that has not been written.

The initiative gap

What we are short of is not capital. It is people willing to spend two years assembling a boring file: measuring losses, negotiating an offtake, checking a border regime, costing a reefer slot.

That work is unglamorous and it is the whole job. The banana in Abidjan and the empty stall in Tunis are not separated by a financing gap. They are separated by the absence of anyone who decided to connect them.

What we do about it

GraceCorp is a Senegalese company in Dakar. We run road freight and sourcing files across West Africa, and we cost routes for exactly this kind of flow: what it takes to move a perishable from a production zone to a port, at what temperature, in how many days, with which documents, and at what real price per tonne.

If you are working on a commodity flow that should exist and does not, send us the commodity, the origin, the destination and the volume you have in mind. We come back with the route, the seasonality and a costed file, or we tell you why it does not hold.

The bananas rot in Abidjan while Tunis runs out. This is not a money problem.