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By Chinyere Anyanwu
Nigeria’s 2025 agenda to strengthen food security faced significant setbacks as escalating insecurity disrupted farming and supply chains across the country.
Armed attacks, banditry and clashes between herders and farmers have forced many rural communities to abandon their fields, threatening both crop production and market supply.
Northern states have borne the brunt of the crisis, with farmers fleeing farmlands and leaving harvests uncollected. Even when crops are successfully planted, transporting produce to markets has become perilous, pushing up costs and reducing the availability of essential food items. The resulting supply gaps are felt nationwide, as prices for staples rise and households struggle to secure adequate nutrition.
Experts say insecurity has amplified pre-existing challenges in the agricultural sector.
Despite government efforts, including input subsidies, mechanised farming support, and irrigation expansion, the impact of these measures has been limited in areas affected by violence. Climatic shocks such as droughts and floods have compounded the problem, but analysts insist that insecurity remains the most immediate barrier to achieving meaningful progress.
As 2025 draws to a close, calls are growing for coordinated strategies that combine security interventions with investment in resilient farming practices and rural infrastructure. Stakeholders warn that unless farmers are protected and rural communities stabilised, Nigeria risks widening gaps in food availability and affordability in the coming year.
The experiences of 2025 highlight a crucial reality: sustainable food security in Nigeria hinges not only on agricultural productivity but also on the safety and stability of the communities that produce the nation’s food. This year, the federal government, in a bid to stabilise prices and ameliorate the hunger, introduced a temporary suspension of import duties, tariffs, and taxes on key staples including rice, maize, wheat, sorghum and millet, a policy designed to run between July15 and December 31, 2024.
The policy, though well-intentioned, had some negative impact on the local agricultural environment, as farmers complained about its crippling effect on their productivity, citing an uncompetitive operating environment. They lamented the losses they suffered after incurring huge production costs, only for the government to flood the market with cheap imported agricultural produce.
According to them, the government was importing food from countries with very farmer-friendly operating environments, while they could not boast of the same privilege.
The farmers noted that the governments of those countries support their food producers with little or zero per cent interest loans, cheap power, mechanisation, and good road networks, while all these are non-existent or come with huge costs in Nigeria.
Some noted that if the government was keen on lowering food prices, it should purchase their produce from them and sell to the country’s consumers at reduced prices.
The year witnessed a considerable reduction in food prices, which was like a breath of fresh air after a long stay in a suffocating atmosphere.
Droughts and heavy flooding, resulting from climate change, took a huge toll on the country’s agricultural sector and food system in the outgoing year. Hundreds of hectares of farmlands in the drought-prone states of Sokoto, Kebbi, Zamfara, Katsina, Kano, Jigawa, Yobe, Borno, and Gombe were affected as farmers lost crops worth millions of naira.
Flooding wreaked its own havoc on farmlands in flood-prone areas in 2025. A typical example was the loss of over N150 million by fish farmers in the Ikorodu area of Lagos State, when their fish farms were washed away in August by flood. This, according to stakeholders, was one of the most devastating losses suffered by investors in the agricultural sector in the outgoing year.
This year, the federal government embarked on a number of measures to boost the agricultural sector’s productivity.
It launched the National Agrifood Systems Investment Plan (NASIP), with a focus on technology and mechanisation through the deployment of drones for faster farming tasks such as harvesting and spraying. To this effect, it deployed over 2,000 tractors and harvesters to the sector.
In addition, the Federal Government secured deals with John Deere for 10,000 tractors, a deal that would span a period of five years.
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To ensure that real farmers benefit from the various policies put in place for them, as well as guarantee the proper implementation of policies, the government launched the National Digital Farmers Registry for better engagement.
It has equally gone further to recapitalise the Bank of Agriculture (BoA) and activate the National Agricultural Development Fund (NADF).
To encourage farmers to practice climate-smart agriculture, the government has promoted regenerative farming, land restoration, and agroforestry. Curtailing post-harvest losses, the government this year introduced initiatives to modernise silos and reduce losses.
To help protect farmers, the federal government recently graduated over 7,000 newly recruited Forest Guards from seven frontline states, with immediate deployment ordered to reinforce internal security and reclaim Nigeria’s forests from criminal activities.
The development follows the completion of a three-month intensive training programme under the Presidential Forest Guards Initiative, launched in May 2025 by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
Graduation ceremonies took place on December 27, 2025, across Borno, Sokoto, Yobe, Adamawa, Niger, Kwara, and Kebbi states. The initiative, coordinated through the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA), aims to deny terrorists, bandits, kidnappers, and other criminal groups access to forested and hard-to-reach areas often used as hideouts.
The government said the training was deliberately rigorous, combining environmental conservation principles with advanced security competencies to produce a disciplined and mission-ready force. Trainees underwent physical and mental conditioning, long-range patrol simulations, tactical fieldcraft, ambush response drills, and rescue operations.
The National Security Adviser Mallam Nuhu Ribadu described the initiative as a major step toward restoring state authority and protecting vulnerable communities. “These Forest Guards are not just uniformed personnel. They are first responders, community protectors, and a critical layer of Nigeria’s security architecture,” Ribadu said. He confirmed that deployment would begin immediately, emphasizing that there would be no administrative gap between graduation and field operations.
The programme recorded a 98.2 per cent completion rate, with 81 trainees disqualified on disciplinary grounds and two others who died from pre-existing medical conditions. All successful participants have been certified and cleared for operational duties.
The Forest Guards are indigenous to their respective local government areas, which the government said would enhance terrain familiarity, intelligence gathering, and community trust in tackling banditry, kidnapping, and illegal exploitation of forest resources.
The federal government also embarked on critical partnerships to boost the sector’s performance, including a collaboration with JICA for input delivery, post-harvest handling, and market access for 500,000 farmers; agreements with Brazil and Germany for mechanisation financing; and strengthening the seed system through Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) cooperation for dry-season farming.
Despite challenges, losses, and upheavals in the agricultural sector in 2025, some progress was recorded.
The sector’s contribution to the economy, according to National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) data, rose to between 26 and 27.8 per cent in the second and third quarters of 2025. The growth in the sector was driven by an increase in crop production. Insecurity remained a major challenge, as farmers continued to face attacks from bandits and herders, resulting in the loss of crops as well as lives.
According to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), at least 2,266 people were killed by bandits or insurgents during the first half of 2025.
The situation has, in no small measure, affected food production, as surviving farmers are afraid to go to their farms for any meaningful agricultural activity.
With the challenges faced by the agricultural sector in 2025, a stakeholder opines that it could become an endangered sector in 2026 if the authorities do not act decisively in the right direction.
The Chief Operating Officer of Capacious Farms and Foods, Chi Tola Roberts, said 2026 could be a better year for Nigeria’s agriculture and food system if the country “embraces a deliberate productivity agenda. Smart, technology-driven input support programmes, using digital vouchers for seeds and fertilisers, can help farmers access what they need while minimising leakages.
Mechanisation should shift from government-owned fleets to private service providers who lease equipment to farmers at affordable rates.”
She added, “With the right policies, partnerships, and investments, agriculture could be the engine that drives Nigeria’s economic transformation in 2026.”
