Unlocking Nigeria’s food system potential

Global food systems are increasingly being shaped by the transmission of geopolitical shocks into input markets, trade routes, and domestic production costs. Recent instability in the Middle East has further amplified this dynamic, reinforcing volatility in energy and fertiliser markets and deepening uncertainty across global value chains. Despite periods of progress, the effects on food security persist through mechanisms that reach well beyond the immediate geography of conflict.

In West and Central Africa, this pressure is already materialising in food system stress. The World Food Program has projected that 10.4 million people could fall into food insecurity, representing a 21% increase. Rising fuel and fertiliser costs, combined with ongoing geopolitical tensions, are tightening already fragile agricultural systems. These shocks are not isolated, they interact with structural vulnerabilities in production, logistics, and market access, while new frictions such as transport cost inflation and side-selling further complicate value chain stability.

In Nigeria, these dynamics are particularly visible because they intersect with a large but unevenly coordinated agricultural base. The country’s cassava sector, despite producing over 60 million tonnes annually, illustrates the gap between production scale and system resilience.

Cassava is a crop that plays a vital role in food security. According to the Nigeria Cassava Investment Accelerator, Nigeria's cassava sector has been advancing, with better-equipped processing facilities for starch, flour, and ethanol, as well as an enabling policy environment. Nigeria remains the world’s largest cassava producer, yet industrial processing capacity is significantly underutilised, with many facilities operating at only 30–40%.

Since the onset of geopolitical tensions, including disruptions in global energy markets linked to the broader US-Iran conflict, domestic petrol and diesel prices in Nigeria have increased by 36%, driving up production and logistics costs along the cassava value chain, resulting in a severe margin squeeze for value chain actors and exacerbating underlying inefficiencies in production and trade.

In Nigeria, the value chains for cassava, grains, and palm oil have been strengthened through several initiatives, including traceable supply systems and structured market integration. In addition, block farming models are explored as a key coordination infrastructure. By clustering production and aligning it more directly with offtake demand, they reduce inefficiencies in input delivery and product collection while improving the predictability of supply required for industrial processing.

IDH helped introduce the block farming model to address challenges within agricultural value chains by reducing transport distances for service delivery and offtake, and reducing side-selling due to having more oversight of farm activities. In Nigeria, the model offers a solution for the lack of cassava feed stocks and quality for industrial cassava products, including starch, high-quality cassava flour, sweeteners, and bioethanol. 

As Dayo Ogundijo, program director at IDH, notes: “For investors, the key differentiator in cassava projects is the reliability of feedstock supply. Projects with strong, well-organised farmer networks are viewed as significantly lower risk. Strengthening these networks is faster than deploying new processing technologies or waiting for policy reform, and is largely within operators’ control. Critically, reliable feedstock supply unlocks higher capacity utilisation among processors, improving operational efficiency and profitability, and in turn crowding in new investment for upgrading and expanding processing capacity.”

This is not limited to cassava. In Nigeria’s barley value chain, Nigerian Breweries Plc has been working to develop local barley production to reduce its dependency on imported malted barley.

Working with partners including Dalberg, IDH identified more than 400,000 hectares of suitable farmland across several states to viably grow barley in Nigeria. This solves a foundational bottleneck: knowing where barley can grow locally and at scale. This also enables the transition from pilots to scalable commercial systems. These insights reduce uncertainty for government officials, financiers and the private sector to accelerate the path to industrial-scale barley production in the country.

Taken together, these examples underscore a consistent conclusion: Nigeria’s food system constraint is not production capacity, but coordination. Strengthening the links between production, aggregation, processing, and markets is what ultimately determines resilience. In a volatile global environment, food system autonomy depends less on self-sufficiency than on the ability to maintain functional continuity across value chains under stress.