Africa is going through its worst supply crisis in forty years. Fuel traders generally use financial markets to try to lessen the risk of price fluctuations when they're buying fuel. For african importers, who are often smaller than those in rich regions, they've got smaller balance sheets,. And as a result of them, just import less fuel d there's a second complexity in all f this: The price for deliveries of oil at a future date for which there's a regular market has fallen far below that of deliveries of fuel for immediate delivery.