The United States is considered to be the breadbasket of the world, because it grows, harvests, and supplies the necessary grains so needed to feed people, throughout the world. As might be imagined, the necessity of food, is something that is nothing to be dismissed as being trivial; because a population that is not being fed is going to be both hungry and uneasy, of which, countries that cannot reliably feed their people at a reasonable cost to those people, are in danger of something tragic happening to those people or to stability of its governance, or both.
We read that McKinsey & Company report that "sixty percent of the world’s uncultivated, arable land lies in Africa." This is very good news for Africa, for Africa is not only a continent young in age, but it also is a continent that has an awful lot of mouths to feed; and, of which, should Africa properly develop the land that is currently arable into their version of the breadbasket, this thus becomes beneficial for the people of Africa, as well as also being of needful benefit to the people of the world.
There is a general belief that whoever today's leaders are in a given industry, will also, somehow, be the same leaders tomorrow, and that this, thus goes on forever. In reality, that isn't the way that this world actually operates, because industries do rise and industries do fall, and those established insitutions that have not taken into proper consideration that other countries are themselves also quite capable of generating goods and foods that have previously been performed competently for lengthy periods of time by the historical leaders of such, and thus, believe can't be duplicated or challenged by anyone else, have got it terribly wrong.
For instance, America was once a nation that did a whole lot of domestic manufacturing, but in recent decades a significant portion of that domestic manufacturing has been outsourced to other nations, because those nations are clearly more cost efficient for that manufacturing. This thus signifies that a continent, as in Africa, that is just beginning its economic rise, is more than capable of undercutting in price just about everything that the United States so produces as the world's breadbasket of choice -- should they so choose to concentrate upon that. So too, they could, alternatively to that, at a minimum, make for a viable second source choice for the world, at large.
There is something to be said for the value of being self-sufficient, such as in energy, water, shelter, and in food. Those then, that are able to feed their population very efficiently and reliability, have provided their people with the necessary foundation, which will thus allow those people to be better able to concentrate upon all those other industries and endeavors that will best advanced those peoples. The march then for Africa to continue its progress for its people, will be aided and abetted, by the abundance of its future domestic breadbasket production, closely followed by the export of the excess of such, for profit, to surrounding nations.