Nigerian Farmers Lose N5tn in Two Years – Report
Farmers in Nigeria have lost nearly N5 trillion in productive capital over the past two years, according to a new report by the Foundation for Peace Professionals (PeacePro).
The group said the losses stemmed from policy-induced price crashes, misleading weather forecasts by the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet), and severe market distortions.
“The country’s agriculture sector is drowning in a deep structural crisis,” PeacePro declared in its statement, warning that the situation has already eroded the foundation of food production.
Executive Director of PeacePro, Abdulrazaq Hamzat, described the losses as direct agricultural capital destruction at the producer level.
He emphasized that the estimate does not include secondary economic effects such as consumer inflation, GDP contraction, foreign exchange pressure, or security-related costs.
“Those impacts come later. What has already happened is the liquidation of farmer capital,” Hamzat said.
According to the report, farmers lost control of food prices between 2024 and 2025 due to poorly timed policy interventions, price suppression mechanisms, weak market coordination, and unreliable weather forecasting.
These factors forced producers to sell below cost, wiping out the capital needed to sustain future production cycles. “This was not a market correction. It was a policy shock that transferred value away from producers,” the statement added.
While Nigeria has an estimated 38–40 million people engaged in agriculture, PeacePro stressed that the most severe damage was concentrated among market-facing producers rather than subsistence farmers.
“The most affected group includes 6–8 million producers, small and medium-scale commercial farmers, storage-poor price-taking producers, and farmers engaged in grains, tubers, vegetables, and legumes,” the group explained.
PeacePro likened the scale of destruction to a financial sector collapse, noting one critical distinction. “This crisis did not happen in banks or stock markets. It happened quietly, in farms and rural communities,” the statement said.
The group warned that depleted farmer capital will inevitably lead to reduced planting in 2026, lower domestic food supply, higher food prices, increased rural poverty, and social instability. “Nigeria will soon pay the price for policy decisions that treated farmers as shock absorbers for inflation, if not corrected on time,” it cautioned.