September 14, (THEWILL) – SAM DIALA examines how post-harvest losses are transforming Nigeria’s agricultural abundance into hunger
Nigeria’s food crisis presents one of the country’s most painful contradictions. The nation possesses vast arable land, millions of farmers, a favourable climate and an agricultural sector capable of producing enormous quantities of food. Yet millions of Nigerians go to bed hungry, food prices continue to climb and households are spending an unsustainable proportion of their incomes on feeding themselves.
Deepening Paradox
The paradox is profound: Nigeria’s food problem is not simply that it produces too little; it is also that too much of what it produces never reaches the consumer.
Between the farm and the dining table lies a fragile chain of harvesting, transportation, storage, processing, distribution and marketing. At virtually every stage, food is lost. Fruits rot in the open air. Tomatoes are destroyed because farmers cannot move them quickly enough to urban markets. Grains deteriorate because of inadequate storage. Vegetables perish because cold-chain infrastructure is weak. Root crops and tubers suffer enormous losses from poor handling and inadequate processing facilities.
The result is an extraordinary economic and social waste: Food that could have fed millions is lost before it becomes food on the table. Post-harvest losses therefore represent much more than an agricultural inconvenience. They are a direct contributor to food inflation, rural poverty, unemployment, import dependence and national food insecurity. Nigeria cannot sustainably defeat hunger merely by producing more. It must first learn how to save, preserve, process and distribute what it already produces.
The Invisible Farm-to-Market Crisis
Agricultural production is often measured from the perspective of what leaves the farm. But the more important question is what eventually reaches consumers in edible and marketable condition. A farmer may produce hundreds of tonnes of tomatoes, maize, cassava, fruits or vegetables, yet a significant proportion can disappear before reaching consumers. This loss occurs in several forms.
There are physical losses, where food is destroyed, damaged, contaminated or allowed to rot. There are quality losses, where food remains technically available but loses nutritional or commercial value. There are also economic losses, where farmers are forced to sell at distress prices because they lack storage and bargaining power. The consequence is particularly severe for highly perishable crops.
When a glut occurs during harvest season, farmers frequently have only a few options. They can sell immediately at whatever price traders offer, attempt to transport their produce to distant markets at considerable cost, or watch it deteriorate. This is not merely a failure of agriculture. It is a failure of infrastructure, logistics, finance, processing capacity and market organisation.
When Abundance Becomes Waste
Nigeria’s agricultural landscape provides numerous examples of this paradox. A bumper harvest should ordinarily be good news. Increased supply should reduce prices, improve food availability and increase farmers’ incomes. But in Nigeria, abundance can sometimes produce the opposite result.
When thousands of farmers harvest simultaneously and there are insufficient storage facilities or processing plants, supply overwhelms the market. Prices collapse. Farmers lose income. Unsold food deteriorates. Consumers may briefly enjoy lower prices, but once the harvest season ends, scarcity returns and prices rise again. This vicious cycle is one of the reasons agricultural abundance has failed to translate into food security.
The country effectively moves from seasonal glut to seasonal scarcity, rather than creating a system capable of preserving surplus for future consumption. The paradox is therefore not simply that food is wasted. It is that the same country can experience food surplus in one location and food scarcity somewhere else at almost the same time.
Transportation: The Road Between Farm and Hunger
One of the biggest enemies of Nigeria’s food system is the condition and cost of transportation. Many farmers operate in rural communities where roads are poorly maintained or practically impassable during the rainy season. Produce can spend hours or even days travelling from farms to markets. For perishable crops, time is money.
Every additional hour between harvest and market increases the likelihood of deterioration. Tomatoes bruise. Fruits become overripe. Vegetables wilt. Fish and meat require refrigeration that may not be available.
Meanwhile, high fuel costs, vehicle maintenance expenses, multiple taxes and levies, countless checkpoints and other logistics challenges raise transportation costs. These costs ultimately reach consumers. The farmer receives little, the transporter charges more, the trader adds a margin and the consumer pays the final price. The tragedy is that a substantial part of the price paid by consumers does not necessarily represent increased agricultural productivity. It represents the cost of moving food through an inefficient system.
Storage: Nigeria’s Missing Agricultural Infrastructure
Storage is perhaps the most obvious missing link in Nigeria’s food system. Agricultural production is seasonal, but human consumption is continuous. Farmers therefore need facilities capable of preserving food from periods of abundance into periods of scarcity.
Where such facilities are unavailable, farmers are effectively forced to sell their produce immediately after harvest. This gives buyers considerable bargaining power and leaves farmers vulnerable to distress sales. For grains and other staples, inadequate storage can also expose food to insects, rodents, moisture and fungal contamination. The absence of adequate storage infrastructure therefore creates a double loss. The farmer loses income, while the country loses food.
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A functional agricultural economy should allow farmers to store crops when prices are low and sell when markets improve. This would smoothen seasonal price fluctuations, reduce waste and improve farmers’ bargaining power. Nigeria needs to treat storage infrastructure with the same seriousness with which it treats roads, electricity and other productive infrastructure.
Cold Chains: The Missing Technology in Perishable Agriculture
For vegetables, fruits, dairy products, fish, meat and other perishables, conventional warehouses are not enough. These commodities require temperature-controlled systems. A modern food economy depends on cold chains stretching from the farm through transportation and storage to wholesale and retail markets.
Nigeria’s cold-chain infrastructure remains inadequate relative to the scale of its agricultural production and population. The result is enormous waste of highly nutritious foods. This has consequences beyond economics. When fruits and vegetables become too expensive because of losses, low-income families reduce their consumption. This can worsen nutritional deficiencies, particularly among children.
Thus, post-harvest losses can contribute indirectly to malnutrition even when food is physically produced in large quantities.
The Farmer Is Often the Biggest Loser
It is tempting to blame farmers for post-harvest losses, but the deeper problem is structural. A farmer cannot build a modern cold-storage network alone. He cannot repair a rural highway. He cannot establish an efficient rail freight system. He cannot guarantee electricity for industrial-scale processing. He cannot create a national commodity market.
Yet these are precisely the systems required to transform agricultural production into reliable food supply. The farmer therefore operates at the weakest point of the value chain. When markets are flooded, he bears the price collapse. When transportation becomes expensive, he bears part of the burden. When produce spoils, he absorbs the loss.
This helps explain why Nigerian farmers can remain poor even while food prices are rising. The problem is not necessarily that agriculture creates little value. Rather, too much of the value is lost between production and consumption.
Post-Harvest Losses and Food Inflation
The relationship between post-harvest losses and food inflation deserves far greater attention. When a portion of agricultural output is lost, the quantity reaching consumers falls. If demand remains constant while effective supply declines, prices rise. This means that reducing post-harvest losses can function almost like increasing food production.
Consider a farmer who produces 100 units of a crop but loses 30 units before reaching the market. If better storage and transportation reduce the loss from 30 units to 10, the food economy effectively gains an additional 20 units without planting another hectare. This is a powerful opportunity for Nigeria.
Instead of concentrating exclusively on expanding cultivated land, policymakers should also focus on recovering food that is already being produced but lost. That is potentially one of the cheapest and fastest routes to increasing food availability.
The Industrial Opportunity Hidden in Food Waste
Post-harvest losses also reveal an enormous industrial opportunity. Surplus tomatoes can be processed into paste. Cassava can become flour, starch, ethanol and other industrial products. Mangoes, pineapples and other fruits can be processed into juice, concentrates and dried products.
Maize can feed animal-feed industries. Milk can be processed into yoghurt, cheese and other products. Fish can be frozen, smoked, canned or otherwise processed. Processing extends shelf life while creating additional economic value. Instead of seeing surplus agricultural production as a problem, Nigeria should see it as raw material for agro-industrial development.
This would create jobs beyond farming—in processing, packaging, transportation, warehousing, marketing, engineering and retail. It would also strengthen the country’s manufacturing base.
A Missed Export Opportunity
Nigeria’s post-harvest losses also represent a missed opportunity in international trade. Countries around the world have built successful agricultural export industries by combining production with efficient storage, processing, packaging, certification and logistics.
Nigeria possesses agricultural commodities with significant export potential. But producing a crop is only the beginning. International markets require consistency in quality, quantity, traceability, packaging and delivery. A country that cannot reliably preserve its agricultural output will struggle to become a major agricultural exporter.
Reducing post-harvest losses should therefore be treated as part of Nigeria’s export strategy.
The objective should not merely be to export raw commodities but to develop processed agricultural products with higher value.
Insecurity Driving Farmers Away from Farms in Nigeria
Rising insecurity across Nigeria’s major agricultural zones is forcing thousands of farmers to abandon their lands, disrupting food production and worsening national food security. Reports from Benue, Plateau, Niger, Kogi, Kwara, Sokoto, Zamfara, Katsina, Borno, and other states show that attacks by bandits, insurgents, and armed herdsmen have displaced entire farming communities
In some areas, such as parts of Benue’s Sankera axis, around 90 per cent of residents have fled to Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps due to frequent raids. Farmers in these zones have abandoned crops midharvest, even those stored in barns, for fear of death.
“The human cost is staggering. SBM Intelligence estimated that 1,356 farmers were killed by violent insecurity between 2020 and mid-2024, while research published in 2025 put the number of farmers displaced from their homes and fields at nearly 500,000 within a two-year period. Many of those driven from their farms have ended up in internally displaced persons camps, turning once-productive farmers into dependants on humanitarian assistance.
What Government Must Do
The solution requires a shift from a production-centred agricultural policy to a food-system approach.
Build Strategic Storage Infrastructure
Government should develop strategically located warehouses and modern grain-storage facilities close to major production zones. These facilities should not become another avenue for political patronage.
They should operate commercially, transparently and efficiently, preferably through public-private partnerships.
Develop Cold-Chain Infrastructure
Cold storage should become a central component of agricultural policy. Government can provide incentives for private investment in cold rooms, refrigerated trucks, solar-powered cooling systems and temperature-controlled warehouses.
Fix Rural Roads
Agricultural roads should be treated as economic infrastructure. A road connecting a farming community to a major market is not merely a local road. It is part of the country’s food-supply infrastructure.
Expand Agro-Processing
Government should provide targeted incentives for investors establishing processing plants near production clusters. This will reduce the distance food travels before processing and create local markets for farmers.
Improve Access to Finance
Farmers and agro-processors need affordable credit. Commercial lending rates that make agricultural investment prohibitively expensive undermine efforts to reduce post-harvest losses.
Agricultural finance programmes should therefore focus not only on production but also on storage, processing and logistics.
Promote Farmer Cooperatives
Small farmers often lack the scale necessary to negotiate favourable prices or invest in shared infrastructure. Strong cooperatives can aggregate production, facilitate access to storage and improve farmers’ bargaining power.
Expand Digital Market Infrastructure
Technology can help connect farmers directly with buyers and provide information about prices and demand.
Digital platforms can reduce information asymmetry and help farmers make better decisions about where and when to sell.
Encourage Solar-Powered Infrastructure
Given Nigeria’s electricity challenges, renewable energy offers a major opportunity.
Solar-powered cold rooms and processing facilities can help agricultural communities preserve food without depending entirely on the national grid.
Fix Insecurity
The big elephant in the house is insecurity. Government must be seen to be winning the insecurity battle chocking the survival of many Nigerians – both direct and indirect.
The Private Sector Must Lead the Transformation
Government cannot solve the problems alone.
The private sector has a critical role in building warehouses, processing plants, logistics companies, cold-chain systems, commodity exchanges and modern retail infrastructure.
Banks and financial institutions can finance storage and processing.
Telecommunications companies can provide digital platforms connecting farmers and markets.
Energy companies can develop decentralised power solutions for agricultural clusters.
Insurance companies can design products protecting farmers and agricultural businesses against specific operational risks.
Large food manufacturers can develop contract-farming arrangements that give farmers assured markets.
This is how a genuine agricultural ecosystem should function.
Conclusion: Nigeria Must Stop Losing Food Before It Tries to Produce More
Nigeria cannot afford to continue treating post-harvest losses as an unfortunate side effect of agriculture. They are a national economic emergency.
At a time when millions of households are struggling with food inflation, wasting food that has already been produced is economically indefensible.
The country does not have the luxury of allowing its agricultural abundance to disappear between the farm and the market. Nigeria must therefore rethink its agricultural strategy.
The next agricultural revolution should not be defined only by tractors, fertiliser, improved seeds and hectares cultivated. It should also be defined by warehouses, cold chains, rural roads, processing plants, logistics networks, digital markets and reliable energy.
The farmer who harvests a crop should not be forced into a race against time to sell it before it rots.
The consumer should not pay premium prices for food partly because of inefficiencies that occur after harvest.
And the nation should not simultaneously confront hunger and food waste.
Nigeria’s food paradox is ultimately a paradox of lost opportunity.
The country has land. It has farmers. It has markets. It has an enormous population that provides demand. What it lacks is an efficient system connecting all these assets.The challenge, therefore, is not simply to produce an agricultural abundance. It is to ensure that abundance survives long enough to feed the nation.
Until Nigeria closes the enormous gap between what it harvests and what it consumes, hunger will continue to coexist with agricultural abundance.
And that is perhaps the greatest food paradox of all: a nation can have enough food in its fields and still have hunger at its tables.
Sam Diala is a Bloomberg Certified Financial Journalist with over a decade of experience in reporting Business and Economy. He is Business Editor at THEWILL Newspaper, and believes that work, not wishes, creates wealth.
