There is a particular kind of national failure that is hardest to forgive, not the kind born of poverty or limited means, but the kind that occurs in the presence of abundance. Nigeria has 70 million hectares of arable land, one of the most productive young populations on the continent, and rainfall that most of its neighbours would consider a blessing. It also, as of this year, has over 34 million citizens projected to face crisis-level hunger between June and August 2026, placing it among the countries with the largest increases in acute food insecurity globally, according to the Global Report on Food Crises released in April 2026.
- +Nigeria is not hungry because it has to be
- +The Diagnosis We Keep Avoiding
- +What works and why it is not being scaled
Nigeria is not hungry because it has to be.
Nigeria is not hungry because it has to be. Nigeria is hungry because of choices, repeated, avoidable, and, in many cases, still being made.
The Diagnosis We Keep Avoiding
The drivers of Nigeria’s food insecurity are well-documented and interconnected.
The first is conflict. Banditry, targeted killings, and mass abductions have escalated across the North-West and North-Central, disrupting livelihoods and restricting market access, while armed group activity has expanded across Benue, Kaduna, Katsina, Kebbi, Niger, Plateau, Sokoto, and Zamfara, constraining agricultural production during a critical pre-planting period. Farms cannot be worked by displaced people.
The second is economics. Nigeria grappled with record food inflation, which reached 40.9 per cent in June 2024, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, amid record transportation costs driven by subsidy removal and currency devaluation. The cost of fertilisers and agrochemicals has risen by 56 per cent, discouraging participation in dry-season farming. Smallholder farming, the backbone of Nigeria’s food production, is being priced out of viability.
The third is waste. According to Ibrahim Ishaka, a food systems and nutrition specialist at the FAO, approximately 50 per cent of Nigeria’s agricultural produce is lost along the food supply chain, with perishable items the worst affected. The FAO and Nigeria’s National Stored Products Research Institute estimate that 40 to 60 per cent of perishables spoil before reaching consumers, amounting to some ₦3.5 trillion in wasted produce annually. In a country where tens of millions are hungry, nearly half of what is grown never reaches a plate.
Underlying all three crises is a fourth, and perhaps the most damning: chronic underinvestment dressed up in declarations. Nigeria’s proposed agricultural budget for 2025 constituted only 1.28 per cent of total federal expenditure, leaving a gap of ₦4.33 trillion between the actual allocation and the level required to meet the 10 per cent Maputo Declaration benchmark Nigeria committed to in 2003. More than two decades later, the commitment remains on paper.
What works and why it is not being scaled
The practical answers to each of these failures already exist in Nigeria; they simply need to be replicated aggressively.
On post-harvest losses, the experience at Johnvents is instructive. When we acquired the former Olam cocoa processing facility in Ondo State and invested in converting it from a raw export operation to a value-added processor, producing cocoa butter, alkalised powder, and cocoa cake for European and North American markets, the results were immediate. With 48,000 metric tonnes of annual processing capacity, we now employ over 2,500 people directly and provide stable offtake for thousands of smallholder farmers. The lesson transfers directly to every commodity in Nigeria: value addition does not only capture margin; it stabilises supply chains, strengthens farmer incomes, and builds the structural resilience that food security requires.
On investment, Kaduna State offers a replicable national model. When the state raised its agriculture budget from ₦1.4 billion in 2023 to ₦74.2 billion, over 10 per cent of its total budget, in 2025, international capital followed. A $510 million multilateral financing package from the African Development Bank, Islamic Development Bank, IFAD, and the French Development Agency broke ground on Nigeria’s first Special Agro-Industrial Processing Zone in April 2025. The lesson here is equally transferable: political will attracts capital.
On technology, Nigeria already has proof of what precision tools can achieve. The CropWatch programme, run by UNCTAD in partnership with Nigeria’s National Space Research and Development Agency, uses satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to provide real-time crop monitoring and early warnings on drought and pest risk. In 2024, it detected a severe rainfall deficit months in advance, enabling farmers to adjust planting calendars. The question is not whether the technology works. It is why it remains a pilot rather than standard practice in every state agricultural ministry in the country.
The Global Report on Food Crises 2026 describes food and nutrition crises as no longer temporary shocks but persistent, predictable, and increasingly entrenched, concentrated in a core group of countries, of which Nigeria is one. Nigeria now sits alongside Afghanistan, Sudan, and South Sudan in that group. That is a geopolitical statement as much as a humanitarian one, and Nigerians across every level of government and industry should be deeply uncomfortable with it.
Nigeria is not in this position because it lacks resources, land, or people. It is here because it has treated agriculture as a residual budget line rather than a strategic national priority; because it has signed declarations in Maputo and Malabo and then quietly ignored them; and because it has allowed post-harvest waste, conflict, and economic shock to erode a food system that, with sustained attention, could feed not just Nigeria but much of West Africa.
The path out is not complicated. Fund agriculture at the level declared, not the level convenient. Protect the farmers who grow the food. Process what is grown before it rots. And create the conditions in which private enterprise, which has already demonstrated what is possible, can do so at scale.
Nigeria is not hungry because it has to be. It is hungry because it has chosen, year after year, to look away. That choice can still be reversed, but the window for doing so without catastrophic consequence is narrowing.
John Alamu is Group Managing Director of Johnvents Group, Nigeria’s largest cocoa processor and one of its leading agro-industrial exporters.
