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The research focuses on understanding the gap between trade openness and food security complexity. Existing literature has examined trade openness's effect on food security indicators and stated that it has a positive impact. However, this is the first study that has examined this relationship holistically. Food insecurity is at its worst in Africa, and the continent is highly dependent on trade. Hence, the paper aims to investigate if trade openness impacts food security overall in Africa, using the Global Food Security Index as a proxy indicator. It also examines whether the individual four dimensions of food security are impacted. The research conducts a quantitative analysis with secondary panel data to fulfill this objective. The data span from 2012 to 2021, and 23 African countries were included. The paper employs The Newey–West estimator with OLS to address existing autocorrelation and heteroskedasticity in the data. In this study, globalization was added as a substitute for trade openness to improve the robustness of the trade openness impact on the Global Food Security Index in a separate model. The results reveal that trade openness does not significantly relate to Food security overall or in specific dimensions. Globalization, on the other hand, has a positive impact on food security overall and in three out of the four dimensions. The result suggests that globalization is Africa's primary driver of food security rather than trade openness.