On January 28, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) will lose three of its founding members—Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger—comprising 16% of its population of 424 million and 7% of its GDP. Labeled “Sahelexit” by some commentators, the decision to leave ECOWAS was first announced a year ago by the three countries’ trio of military leaders and is now poised to legally take effect. The three countries have created the Alliance of Sahel States (Alliance des États du Sahel, AES), a mutual defense and security pact formalized through the signing of the Liptako Gourma Charter in 2023.
While ECOWAS has given these three AES states a six-month transition period until July 2025 in case they backtrack and want to return, the AES leaders have rejected that scenario, asserting that their decision is irreversible. Their exit from Africa’s largest political and economic union threatens to disrupt flows of goods, services, and people—with potentially serious consequences for food security in a region where almost 17 million children under five are already acutely malnourished.
Figure 1
Motivations for the breakup and economic impacts
The impetus for the breakup emerged from a series of military coups against democratically elected leaders in 2021 (Mali), 2022 (Burkina Faso), and 2023 (Niger). Given that ECOWAS functions simultaneously as a trade and governance body, with member states passing a Democracy and Governance Protocol in 2001 that condemns military coups, it was compelled to impose sanctions on all three countries, along with Guinea, which experienced a coup in 2021.
Although food was exempted from the sanctions, the resulting increase in transport times and other logistical hurdles contributed to substantial levels of food price inflation in the region. In Niger, for instance, the price of rice rose 8%-38% in the four months after sanctions were imposed in July 2023.At the same time, non-sanctioned ECOWAS countries were also badly affected; Benin experienced a dramatic fall in its revenues at the port of Cotonou, the main transit source for goods going into Niger, while the sanctions on Mali badly hurt revenue generation at the port of Dakar.
The sanctions, plus plans by several ECOWAS members to potentially invade Niger to reverse its coup and release the imprisoned president, angered the military juntas. Resisting calls to return to democratic rule, the leaders claimed ECOWAS was impinging on their national sovereignty and that the regional bloc had not sufficiently supported the three countries’ efforts to fight against jihadist groups. In the year since the AES states announced their planned departure from ECOWAS, other members focused most of their attention on attempting to convince them to remain rather than negotiating the terms of departure. ECOWAS lifted or eased sanctions or other restrictions on all three countries in 2024 as part of this effort. Now, with the departure taking place, there is a high level of uncertainty about what the new regional political and economic configuration might look like.
Implications for food security in the region
While security issues pose immediate challenges for regional cooperation, especially as insurgent attacks are moving further south of the Sahel, there will also be pivotal consequences for food security.
The implications of exit are most obvious for trade relations because the trio is leaving the ECOWAS customs union. Since 2015, import tariffs for intra-ECOWAS goods were eliminated and a common external tariff (CET) with five tariff bands was levied on imports from non-ECOWAS countries regardless of the first port of entry into the bloc. As a consequence of their expected departure, the AES trio will be obligated to adhere to the CET rates for their imports into ECOWAS and revert to using the WTO’s Most Favored Nation rates on imports from ECOWAS countries. They will be further hurt by the community levy, a 0.5% tax ECOWAS imposes on goods from non-ECOWAS member states to fund the bloc’s budget.
Since the AES countries are landlocked, the economic impacts from the tariff increases and the loss of coastal port access in Dakar, Cotonou, Abidjan, Tema, and Lomé will be worse for them than for their remaining ECOWAS counterparts. For instance, almost 60% of Burkina Faso’s vegetable exports and 90% of its live animal exports go to Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. Onions are one of Niger’s main exports, with Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and Benin making up its main export markets. Moreover,the decision may have unintended consequences for the AES countries’ goal of combating security concerns; when Mauritania left ECOWAS in 2000, the resulting differences between tariffs and trade rules fueled smuggling and corruption that was used as a source of revenue for militant groups in the region.
In turn, the food insecurity of vulnerable populations in the AES countries will deteriorate. Already, the cost of a daily nutritious diet in these three countries is 110% higher than the daily minimum wage in the region. According to the World Food Programme, the trio is also among the world’s hunger hotspots in early 2025, with 7.5 million people across the three countries now classified as in crisis, emergency, or famine conditions.
Since ECOWAS established a Regional Food Security Reserve in 2013 to pool cereal resources for countries in the region to respond to food crises, the three countries—along with Ghana and Nigeria—have been among the biggest beneficiaries of the Reserve. However, the ECOWAS Secretariat noted that their access to this Reserve likely will end by leaving the bloc.
There are also implications for food processors in the Sahel, especially potential impacts on access to electricity and raw agricultural materials. In fact, Burkina Faso and Niger import a majority of their electricity from Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria, respectively, and the AES trio faces possible exclusion from the ECOWAS West African Power Pool, which aims to increase members’ access to the regional electricity market.
In addition, the exit will create challenges for processors’ access to raw materials such as wheat flour and edible oils, which much of the region requires to be fortified with iron, vitamin A, and other nutrients. For instance, in 2022, more than 80% of Mali’s imports of wheat flour came from Senegal. Similarly, Burkina Faso cannot meet consumption demand for edible oils based just on domestic production, requiring it to import about half of its palm oil from Côte d’Ivoire. Moreover, the West African regional alliance for large-scale food fortification that was launched last year could lose important momentum, since it is overseen by ECOWAS’s West African Health Organization (WAHO), which is headquartered in Burkina Faso. Indeed, during its extraordinary summit last year, ECOWAS anticipated needing to close and relocate seven regional agencies across the three countries, including WAHO.
Finally, the livelihoods of Sahelian migrants living in ECOWAS countries remain uncertain. Due to ECOWAS’ Freedom of Movement Protocol, more than 1.3 million Burkinabes and half a million Malians live in Côte d’Ivoire, many of them running small, informal sector businesses to support their families back home. Protests by the Malian diaspora against their country’s ECOWAS exit occurred in Abidjan in early 2025.
ECOWAS at a critical juncture
As ECOWAS celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2025, what are possible scenarios going forward? Despite the six-month window to change their minds, the trio of military actors leading Mali (Assimi Goïta), Burkina Faso (Ibrahim Traoré), and Niger (Abdourahamane Tiani) are unlikely to do so. In fact, they may be even further encouraged by recent suggestions that Togo might also join the AES.
Instead, the junta leaders are proposing various ways in which the relationship between AES and ECOWAS will proceed. For instance, they have claimed that they will maintain visa-free travel from ECOWAS countries into AES ones, although such a proposal would need to first be approved by all 12 remaining ECOWAS member states. Another scenario is that they will negotiate various bilateral agreements with their major ECOWAS trading partners, as well as with other countries that offer sea access, such as Mauritania and Morocco.
However, allowing a relatively easy departure from ECOWAS would lead to some unfortunate consequences. First, the deterrent effect of ECOWAS sanctions on other potential military coup leaders in the region will likely be weakened by the precedent of a negotiated soft AES exit from the bloc. Given that both Guinea Bissau and Sierra Leone also experienced coup attempts in the last two years, this is a significant concern for the legitimacy of the Democracy and Governance Protocol and the continued integrity of the regional bloc. Second, it will likely result in a host of bilateral and plurilateral agreements that undermine efforts at regional trade integration and the continent’s aspirations to create a single African market through the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
Finally, the problems surrounding the “Sahelexit” are not merely a serious challenge for West African countries. They embody a larger set of tensions that will be prominent in development policy in Africa and elsewhere in 2025. These include whether political objectives should be embedded within trade arrangements—an ongoing debate related to the renewal of the African Growth and Opportunity Act this year—and whether national sovereignty should be prioritized over regional cooperation in the face of growing cross-border climate, conflict, and health threats to food security.
Danielle Resnick is a Senior Research Fellow with IFPRI’s Markets, Trade, and Institutions Unit. Opinions are the author’s.
