Editorial: Inflation targeting must reckon with the food question

The standard critique of inflation targeting in Africa runs: food dominates the basket, food inflation is supply-driven, and policy rates cannot make it rain. All true. The conclusion often drawn — that inflation targeting is therefore unfit for African economies — does not follow.

What the food share changes is the transmission narrative, not the anchor's value. Expectations in high food-share economies are formed at the market stall; when maize prices double, wage demands and transport fares follow regardless of the output gap. The central bank cannot prevent the first-round shock. Its entire value lies in convincing the economy the shock will not become a spiral.

That argues for frameworks with honest communication about what policy can and cannot do: core measures published alongside headline, tolerance bands wide enough to absorb harvest volatility, and — crucially — coordination with the fiscal instruments that actually address food supply: storage, logistics, import windows.

The alternative to an imperfect anchor is not a better anchor. It is drift. Africa's disinflation of recent years happened disproportionately in countries whose central banks kept an explicit target and explained their misses. That record deserves more respect than the framework's critics allow.