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Africa must move beyond exporting raw agricultural commodities and focus on processing, storage, trade and financing to unlock the full value of its food sector, stakeholders at the ninth Agriculture Summit Africa (ASA 2026) have said.
The stakeholders, including government officials, investors, development finance institutions and agribusiness leaders, said the continent must redesign agricultural financing to reflect the longer production cycles of farming and livestock.
Speaking at the summit in Abuja, Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, Senator Abubakar Kyari, said Africa spends more than $100 billion annually importing food it has the capacity to produce.
He said the huge import bill highlighted the value Africa loses by exporting raw commodities and importing processed food at higher costs.
Held under the theme, “Building the Next Superpower: Africa’s Food Power Play,” the two-day summit was co-convened by Sunbeth Global Concepts and attracted more than 12,000 physical and virtual participants.
The summit was also designed to mobilise a $300 million pipeline of investable agricultural projects, with nearly 100 structured investment matchmaking sessions held through its Deal Room.
Opening the second day, Group Executive, Corporate and Investment Banking, Sterling Bank, Dele Faseemo, said food security had become a major national security issue.
“Simply put, food security is national security,” he said, stressing the need for the sector to move from ideas and declarations to practical and measurable results.
According to him, Africa must move “from potential to execution, ideas to scalable solutions, fragmented interventions to coordinated action, and from declarations of intent to measurable results.”
Discussions at the summit focused on food sovereignty, intra-African trade under the African Continental Free Trade Area, climate risks, cold-chain infrastructure, technology, data and financing for smallholder farmers, women and young people.
Speakers noted that increased farm production alone would not solve Africa’s food challenges if farmers continued to lose value through poor storage, transportation, processing and access to markets.
Minister of Livestock Development, Idi Mukhtar Maiha, called for financing models tailored to livestock production, arguing that conventional short-term, high-interest loans were unsuitable for biological assets.
“We cannot finance biological assets as though they are fast-moving consumer goods,” Maiha said.
He said livestock contributes about $32 billion to Nigeria’s economy and could rise to $74 billion by 2035 under the country’s 10-year national strategy.
To achieve this, he said Nigeria must reduce the long-distance transportation of live animals and invest in feedlots, modern abattoirs, cold chains and leather manufacturing.
Also speaking, Sterling Bank’s Group Head, Agric Finance and Solid Minerals, Dr Olushola Obikanye, said Africa’s major challenge was not a lack of agricultural potential but its inability to convert that potential into productivity, value and economic power.
He said agriculture should no longer be viewed only as food production but as a platform connecting farmers to finance, technology, infrastructure, processing, logistics and markets.
“The opportunity is not simply to produce more food, it is to create and capture more value: from commodities to competitive industries, from fragmented interventions to integrated systems, from subsistence to scalable enterprises, from food security to food power,” Obikanye said.
A major highlight of the summit was the launch of AgricHub, an agricultural business platform designed to connect farmers and agribusinesses with financiers, markets and agricultural technology companies.
The organisers said the platform would help bring capital, businesses, technology and market opportunities closer together within the agricultural value chain.
Other participants included Minister of State for Agriculture and Food Security, Senator Aliyu Sabi Abdullahi; Benue State Commissioner for Agriculture and Food Security, Dr Benjamin Ashaver; IFC’s Upstream Advisory Manager for Agribusiness in Africa, Sarah Ockman; and Namibia’s Chief Veterinarian in the Directorate of Veterinary Services, Dr Janett-Star Erastus.
The summit also attracted representatives from processing, insurance, logistics, technology, finance and development organisations.
