A cursory look at reports from agricultural conferences and articles related to the sector reveals a few recurring themes. Among the challenges often listed are a lack of financing, insecurity, low productivity, and poor post-harvest storage. A less-mentioned challenge, but one which permeates the aforementioned challenges, is the lack of verifiable information on the sector. This dearth of reliable information leads to priority misplacement in policymaking, disastrous price spikes in everything from onions to rice, discourages investment in the sector since there is no verifiable data to base such investments on, and leaves the entire sector in the dark. At Veriv Africa, we are facing the challenge head-on, beginning with our food pricing dashboard and other related products in the works.
The State of Play
Agriculture continues to play an important role in the national economy and the livelihoods of many Nigerians. The sector employs over 30% of the nation’s workforce and contributes 25% to the national economy. More so, the sector is increasingly gaining recognition as a potential source of diversification for an economy inextricably dependent on crude oil earnings. In 2024, cocoa export earnings crossed the $1 billion mark, a major achievement for the $5.4 billion non-oil export sector and a signal of the potential that lies in the agriculture export niche.
Unfortunately, the sector continues to walk in the blind. Policies by national and subnational governments, no matter how well-intentioned, fail to achieve their intended outcome. The most glaring was the Anchor Borrowers Program by the Central Bank of Nigeria, which recorded a little over 50% repayment rate and woefully failed to reach smallholder farmers who make up 88% of Nigeria’s farming population. The disconnect between the program’s goals and its realities, especially over many years, points to a significant information gap between policymakers and farmers/traders.
Beyond the above consequence, the sector’s opacity continues to hamper international trading interest and investment inflow. Access to basic information on production centres, key production and pricing numbers, and other critical data remains challenging to find. While social media has helped create a forum for user-generated and reported data on some pricing numbers, its reliability and inconsistency render such data difficult to use for high-value transaction decisions. For the international trader interested in the sector, the options are limited to relying on an army of middlemen, with consequences for the end price, or seeking business in neighbouring countries with comparatively better agricultural information climates.
What We Are Doing Differently
Veriv Africa has been actively drawing attention to the challenges facing the sector and proffering practical solutions. From advocating an affordable technology-based land titling regime, through urging practical alternatives to proofs of residence requirements in farmer settlements shut out of the banking system, to designing more impactful agricultural financing options for local farmers, we continue to think differently, and practically, about the sector’s challenges, its potentials, and what needs to be done differently. The Veriv Africa Food Pricing and Production Dashboard is our attempt to plug the information gap in the sector.
With the dashboard, we aim to create a one-stop shop for key stakeholders, including international commodities traders, policymakers, farmers, academics, and regular citizens, to get access to reliable data on the state of the sector across key value chains. This includes pricing changes, real-time production numbers, relevant developments across key value chains such as pest attacks, spikes in farm insecurity, natural disasters, and more. With the dashboard, traders can gain access to comprehensive pricing dynamics, policymakers gain better insights into the end users of any intervention fund or policy, and citizens are better informed on the state of key food value chains to enable informed spending decisions.
The dashboard will draw on monthly, eventually weekly, data inflows from key production centres around the country and will focus on select food and cash crop value chains. This pricing and production intelligence exercise will be combined with extensive field surveys (ideally every quarter) to enable the team to gain insights from the field and make sense of the numbers we report. Over time, we intend to expand our crop coverage and location coverage and incorporate other key information that affects the sector.
Conclusion
The Nigerian agriculture sector holds enormous potential. Beyond cocoa, other key export crops, including cashews, sesame, ginger, etc., could play a major role in growing and diversifying the nation's export earnings. However, key challenges remain, including the dearth of real-time information on the sector. The Veriv Africa Dashboard could help plug this gap. Stay tuned for updates on the dashboard. While waiting, you can read the findings from our first baseline survey report here.
References
Food and Agriculture Organization. (2018). Country factsheet on smallholder family farms: Nigeria. Food and Agriculture Organization. https://www.fao.org/family-farming/detail/en/c/1141264/
National Bureau of Statistics. (2024). Foreign trade in goods statistics Q4. National Bureau of Statistics. https://www.nigerianstat.gov.ng/elibrary/read/1241466
