If you have been to any major market in Nigeria lately, from Mile 12 in Lagos to Wuse in Abuja, you would have likely noticed something unsettling. Tomatoes now feel like luxury items. Yam tubers are half their usual size, but double their price. Staples like onions, pepper, and maize arrive late or not at all. And while urban dwellers are feeling the brunt of rising food costs, the real crisis lies elsewhere, in the broken, bloodied corridors that once connected our food-producing regions to our city plates.
As of August 2025, Nigeria is not merely experiencing food inflation. We are watching the systemic collapse of critical agricultural trade routes, particularly those running through the Northwest and Northcentral zones. The highways that carried food to our cities have become dangerous gauntlets. Truck drivers are being ambushed. Farmers have fled their fields. Aggregators are suspending operations. And no one, from the village youth to the Lagos retailer, is untouched by the consequences.
This isn’t just a security crisis anymore. It’s a supply chain war with national implications.
A Crisis in Motion: When Roads Become Death Traps
For years, regions like Benue, Niger, Plateau, Kogi, and Kaduna have served as Nigeria’s food basket, supplying over 60% of our tomatoes, grains, yams, and livestock to the rest of the country. But now, these areas are trapped in a perfect storm of insecurity, neglect, and weak logistics. Banditry in Zamfara and Katsina has pushed herder groups southward, intensifying long-standing conflicts with farming communities in Niger and Benue. In the last three months alone, over a dozen major food trucks have been hijacked or burnt along the Abuja–Lokoja–Okene–Benin corridor, one of the most critical links between the North and Lagos. In Nasarawa, farmers in Doma and Keffi have abandoned hectares of arable land after persistent attacks by armed groups. And in Kaduna’s Giwa axis, truck drivers now demand military escort or triple pay before attempting the route. The result? Food is either not moving, or it’s moving at exorbitant cost, with those costs landing squarely on consumers.
Urban Markets Are Choking on the Silence
In Lagos, Abuja, and Port Harcourt, the market shelves may still appear full, but the prices are quietly telling a different story. Interestingly, while insecurity continues to disrupt northern supply routes, recent harvest inflows from key producing states have temporarily eased pressure on some staples like maize. According to Nairametrics, the price of a 50 kg bag of yellow maize fell from ₦78,000 in June to ₦65,000 in July 2025, a 16.7% decline linked to seasonal supply rebounds. Similarly, BusinessDay reports a notable drop in maize feed costs, revealing that a metric ton of maize now sells for ₦450,000, down from ₦600,000 earlier in the year, equivalent to about ₦22,500 per 50 kg bag, compared to ₦30,000 just months ago.
Yet despite these momentary dips, broader supply chain distortions persist. Traders, grappling with inconsistent deliveries and insecurity along traditional food corridors, are increasingly sourcing from smaller southern producers or turning to imported alternatives, a shift that further entangles the food economy in Nigeria’s forex volatility and inflationary spiral.
And it’s not just staple food that are affected. The informal food economy is feeling the ripple. Garri grinders are complaining about poor-quality cassava. “Mama put” joints are shrinking portions. Poultry farms that once relied on Northern maize and soy now face impossible feed costs.
This is a national supply chain haemorrhage, and we’re treating it like a minor wound.
Abandoned Farmlands and a Retreating Rural Economy
Back in the food-producing states, the story is even bleaker. Smallholder farmers, who form the backbone of Nigeria’s agriculture, are no longer planting at scale. Many are shifting to short-cycle crops or low-risk subsistence farming. Others have given up entirely. Tractor owners, transporters, and local aggregators are losing business, and without demand, input suppliers and agro-dealers are packing up.
The message is simple: no matter how much we talk about boosting productivity, if farmers can’t move what they grow, they’ll stop growing. The rural economy is grinding to a halt, and unless something changes, we are looking at multi-year ripple effects on employment, youth livelihoods, and food system resilience.
Why We Are Here: Structural Fragility Meets Armed Conflict
This didn’t start yesterday. Nigeria’s agricultural logistics system has always been fragile, built on bad roads, fragmented middlemen, and a lack of cold storage or processing infrastructure. But insecurity has now pushed that fragile system off the edge. Our response has been tepid at best. There’s no centralized food mobility command. No national supply chain contingency plan. We have a Ministry of Agriculture, a Ministry of Transport, a Ministry of Defence, but no coordinated strategy that binds them together in service of one mission: keep food moving safely.
Ironically, programmes like “Produce for Lagos” show that state/subnational governments are starting to recognize the danger. But even that initiative will hit a wall if the food meant for Lagos can’t leave Kogi or Jigawa without armed escort.
Policy Recommendations: From Pain to Planning
It’s time to stop treating this like a peripheral issue. If we don’t secure Nigeria’s food corridors now, hunger will spread faster than we can legislate. Here’s what must happen:
1. Declare Emergency Agricultural Trade Routes
The Federal Government must identify and designate a network of “Agro Logistics Priority Corridors” and deploy armed convoy protection for food trucks in high-risk zones. These convoys can operate like mobile green lanes , ensuring uninterrupted movement of perishable and staple goods.
2. Develop a Federal Food Mobility Strategy
A joint task force between the Ministries of Agriculture and Food Security, National Planning, Defence, Transport, and Internal Affairs should be created to map national food flows, monitor risks, and coordinate responses. This must be embedded in Nigeria’s national food security strategy.
3. Invest in Regional Storage and Aggregation Hubs
Rather than rely solely on long-haul movement, Nigeria must build decentralized storage and processing hubs in safer zones, especially in the Middle Belt, South West and South-South, to buffer disruptions and stabilize prices.
4. Incentivize Secure Supply Chain Innovation
Support private-sector logistics firms to invest in trackable, secure agri-transport solutions, including cold chain logistics, rail cargo for food, and insurance-backed delivery contracts.
5. Revive Rural Conflict Mediation Mechanisms
Many of these conflicts are longstanding but solvable. The government must invest in community-level conflict resolution platforms, land use reforms, and clear livestock movement policies (that does not benefit a few while robbing the majority), to de-escalate tensions in food-producing zones.
Final Thoughts: If the Roads Collapse, So Does the Nation
We cannot feed a nation on fear. When the very roads that connect food to markets become corridors of violence, we are no longer dealing with just agriculture, we are staring at a national security emergency. The markets may stay open. The shops may still sell rice. But behind every inflated price and every empty crate is a broken promise, that our food system will keep us alive. If we don’t act now, we are not only failing our farmers. We are sentencing our cities to slow, silent hunger.
The roads to food security are literally under attack. And the time to defend them is now.
