Farmers Suffered N5trn Capital Wipeout In 2 Years – Group

The Foundation for Peace Professionals (PeacePro) has declared Nigeria’s agriculture sector to be in a deep structural crisis, warning that Nigerian farmers have lost nearly ₦5 trillion in productive capital over the past two years due to alleged policy-induced price crashes, poor and misleading weather forecasts by the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet) and severe market distortions.

The executive director of PeacePro, Abdulrazaq Hamzat, described the losses as direct agricultural capital destruction at the producer level.

He stressed that the estimate did 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,” he said.

Hamzat noted that Nigeria did not successfully “control food prices” in 2024–2025, adding that, instead, a combination of poorly timed policy interventions, price suppression mechanisms, weak market coordination and unreliable weather forecasting by NiMet forced farmers to sell produce below cost, wiping out the capital required to sustain future production cycles.

“This was not a market correction. It was a policy shock that transferred value away from producers,” he added.

Hamzat continued, “While Nigeria has an estimated 38–40 million people engaged in agriculture, the most severe damage was concentrated among market-facing producers, not subsistence farmers, although subsistence farmers were also adversely affected, particularly by poor and misleading weather forecasts issued by NiMet.

“The most affected group includes 6–8 million producers, small and medium-scale commercial farmers, storage-poor price-taking producers, farmers engaged in grains, tubers, vegetables and legumes,” he said.

Hamzat explained that repeated price collapses across two consecutive production cycles resulted in aggregate capital losses approaching ₦5 trillion, even under conservative assumptions.