Onome Amuge
Plantain, a versatile staple, thrives across Nigeria’s southern states, feeding a rapidly growing population and providing a livelihood for countless small-scale farmers. As a food, it is consumed boiled, fried, and roasted, and has become a relevant raw material for processing industries producing flour, chips, and even animal feed.
Yet, despite its commanding presence and a projected global market value soaring to over $52 billion by 2033, Nigeria, one of the world’s top producers, is a marginal and almost invisible player in the international trade of the crop. This disconnect between domestic potential and negligible global impact is seen as a testament to the systemic challenges and policy failures that have consistently held back a sector ripe for a major economic breakout.
Data from the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) shows Nigeria producing an estimated 3.1 million tonnes of plantains annually. This production volume is surpassed only by Cameroon, Ghana, Uganda, and Colombia, placing Nigeria firmly in the top tier of global producers. However, a deeper analysis into the numbers reveals a critical weakness; being that Nigerian production is overwhelmingly dominated by small-scale, subsistence-focused farming. These operations, while vital for local food security, lack the scale, capital, and technological sophistication required to generate the consistent, high-volume output necessary for a dominant export market.
As a result, Nigeria’s fast-rising domestic demand, driven by a growing urban population, is often barely met, leaving little to no surplus for international trade. This supply-demand imbalance keeps the plantain business locked in a local-market-only paradigm, discouraging the kind of large-scale investment that could transform it into a global powerhouse.
According to industry stakeholders, the most significant barrier to the plantain sector’s growth is not rooted in the soil, but in policy. This is as the government’s framework of agricultural support has systematically overlooked the crop, creating a policy vacuum that has starved the sector of financial and technical resources.
