Onome Amuge
As Nigeria enters 2026, the country’s ambition to stabilise food prices and rebuild confidence in its agricultural economy is confronting an uncomfortable reality. This is as food security has become as much a question of security governance and policy coherence as it is of seeds, soil and rainfall.
The past year exposed deep fault lines in Africa’s most populous country’s food system. Despite renewed government activism, from mechanisation drives and credit interventions to emergency trade policies, food production remained hostage to violence in rural areas, climate volatility and difficult trade-offs between consumer relief and farmer incentives. What emerged was not a single crisis, but a convergence of risks that continues to test Nigeria’s economic management as inflationary pressures, social discontent and fiscal constraints remain tightly intertwined.
At the centre of the challenge lies insecurity. Armed banditry, insurgent activity and recurrent clashes between herders and farmers disrupted agricultural output across large swathes of the country in 2025, undermining one of the government’s core economic objectives: ensuring affordable food while reducing dependence on imports.
Northern Nigeria, which produces a substantial share of the country’s grains and livestock, bore the brunt. Farmers in states such as Sokoto, Zamfara, Katsina, Borno and Niger abandoned fields amid rising attacks, leaving crops unharvested and supply chains fractured. In many areas, planting cycles were shortened or skipped altogether as fear replaced confidence. Even where harvests were secured, moving produce to markets became fraught with risk, raising transport costs and discouraging aggregation.
The impact rippled through the economy. Food prices, which had already risen in previous years due to currency weakness and global supply shocks, remained volatile despite intermittent easing. For urban households, particularly low-income earners, food inflation continued to absorb a disproportionate share of income. For rural producers, insecurity translated into lost income, higher costs and an erosion of incentives to invest in the next planting season.
Economists say insecurity has amplified long-standing structural weaknesses in Nigeria’s agricultural sector. Poor rural infrastructure, fragmented landholdings, limited mechanisation and high post-harvest losses were already constraining productivity. Violence turned these weaknesses into systemic risks.
Climate shocks compounded the pressure. Drought conditions in parts of the north-west and north-east damaged cereal output, while heavy flooding in other regions wiped out crops, livestock and aquaculture investments. In August 2025 alone, fish farmers in Ikorodu, on the outskirts of Lagos, reported losses exceeding N150 million after floodwaters destroyed ponds and stock. Similar stories played out across flood-prone river basins, reinforcing concerns about the vulnerability of Nigeria’s food system to climate change.
Yet insecurity remained the most immediate and disruptive force. Data from the National Human Rights Commission showed that at least 2,266 people were killed by bandits or insurgents in the first half of 2025. Many of the victims were rural residents whose livelihoods depend on farming. Survivors often chose to relocate rather than return to their land, shrinking the agricultural labour force at a time when population growth is accelerating demand.
Faced with rising food prices and public pressure, the federal government turned to trade policy as an emergency lever. Between mid-July and the end of December 2024, authorities suspended import duties, tariffs and taxes on key staples including rice, maize, wheat, sorghum and millet. The move helped ease price pressures and contributed to a noticeable moderation in food inflation during parts of 2025, offering temporary relief to consumers battered by years of rising living costs.
But the policy came at a cost. Domestic farmers complained that the influx of cheaper imports undercut local production just as they were grappling with high input costs, insecurity and climate losses. Many argued that the playing field was fundamentally uneven, as imported food arrived from countries where producers benefit from subsidised credit, reliable power, mechanisation and efficient logistics, considered conditions that remain elusive in Nigeria.
Some farmer groups proposed government-backed purchases of domestic produce at guaranteed prices, followed by subsidised resale to consumers. Such schemes, they argued, would protect both producers and households while strengthening local supply chains. Fiscal realities, however, limited the scope for large-scale procurement, particularly as Nigeria continues to juggle debt servicing pressures and competing budget priorities.
Against this backdrop, the federal government sought to recalibrate its agricultural strategy. In 2025, the government launched the National Agrifood Systems Investment Plan (NASIP), a framework aimed at boosting productivity through technology, mechanisation and private-sector participation. More than 2,000 tractors and harvesters were deployed, and a five-year agreement with John Deere for 10,000 tractors was announced, signalling an ambition to modernise farming at scale.
To address longstanding inefficiencies in farmer identification and subsidy delivery, authorities rolled out a National Digital Farmers Registry. The aim was to ensure that input support, credit schemes and extension services reached genuine producers rather than intermediaries. The government also recapitalised the Bank of Agriculture and activated the National Agricultural Development Fund, hoping to crowd in private investment and reduce reliance on ad hoc interventions.
Climate resilience featured more prominently in policy discourse. Programmes promoting regenerative agriculture, agroforestry and land restoration gained traction, while efforts to modernise silos and reduce post-harvest losses were expanded. Partnerships with international agencies, including Japan’s JICA and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, focused on dry-season farming, seed systems and market access for hundreds of thousands of farmers.
But implementation gaps persisted, particularly in insecure regions. Mechanisation equipment could not be fully deployed where farmers were unwilling or unable to access land. Input support lost effectiveness when planting cycles were disrupted. And private investors remained cautious, wary of security risks that insurance markets are ill-equipped to absorb.
It was in this context that security policy began to move closer to the centre of the food security debate. The federal government stated that in late 2025, it had graduated more than 7,000 newly recruited Forest Guards from seven frontline states, deploying them immediately to reclaim forested areas used by criminal groups. Coordinated through the Office of the National Security Adviser, the Presidential Forest Guards Initiative aimed to deny bandits and insurgents safe havens while restoring confidence in rural communities.
Officials described the programme as a critical layer in Nigeria’s internal security architecture. Recruits, drawn from local communities, underwent training in patrol operations, tactical response and environmental protection. The emphasis on local knowledge was intended to improve intelligence gathering and rebuild trust between security forces and residents.
Whether the initiative will deliver lasting results remains an open question as 2026 unfolds. Security analysts caution that forest policing alone cannot resolve the drivers of rural violence, including land disputes, poverty and weak local governance. Still, agribusiness leaders argue that visible improvements in security would have an outsized impact on agricultural output, even before other reforms take hold.
Despite the turbulence, agriculture remained a significant contributor to Nigeria’s economy. National Bureau of Statistics data showed the sector accounting for between 26 and 27.8 per cent of GDP in the second and third quarters of 2025, driven largely by crop production. The figures underscored the sector’s resilience, and its centrality to economic stability, even as insecurity continued to suppress its full potential.
Looking ahead, policymakers face the tasks of protecting consumers from food inflation, supporting farmers’ livelihoods, restoring security and managing fiscal constraints are objectives that often pull in different directions. The experience of 2025 indicates that isolated measures are unlikely to suffice.
“There has to be a shift from reactive fixes to a productivity-led strategy,” said Chi Tola Roberts, chief operating officer of Capacious Farms and Foods. She argues that technology-driven input support, delivered through digital vouchers, could reduce leakages and improve efficiency. Mechanisation, she added, should increasingly be provided by private service operators leasing equipment to farmers, rather than government-owned fleets.
These perspectives underscore a growing consensus in 2026 that Nigeria’s food security challenge is, at its core, a systemic one. According to analysts, addressing it will require coordinated interventions spanning security, climate adaptation, infrastructure, finance and trade, backed by sustained political commitment that extends beyond short-term price controls.
As it stands, the stakes are high. With population growth accelerating and urban demand on the rise, sustained disruptions to domestic food production could deepen inequality and intensify social pressures. For a government aiming to stabilise the economy and restore public confidence, agriculture represents both a vulnerability and a critical opportunity for recovery.
