PeacePro: Nigeria’s Agriculture Sector Suffers ₦5trn Capital Wipeout in Two Years

Hammed Shittu in Ilorin

The Foundation for Peace Professionals (PeacePro) at the weekend said that Nigerian farmers have lost nearly ₦5 trillion (approximately $4billion) in productive capital over the past two years.

The group said the ugly development was due to policy induced price crashes, poor and misleading weather forecasts by the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet), and severe market distortions.

A statement issued in Ilorin, signed by the group’s Executive Director, Abdulrazaq Hamzat, described the losses as direct agricultural capital destruction at the producer level.

The statement stressed the estimate does 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,” PeacePro said.

According to the organization, Nigeria did not successfully “control food prices” in 2024–2025.

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,” the statement added.

While Nigeria has an estimated 38-40 million people engaged in agriculture, PeacePro clarified that, “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.

“These producers supply Nigeria’s urban and regional food markets”.

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

PeacePro maintained the scale of destruction is comparable to a financial sector collapse, with one critical difference, “This crisis did not happen in banks or stock markets. It happened quietly, in farms and rural communities.”

Hamzat also cautioned that depleted farmer capital will inevitably lead to reduced planting in 2026, lower domestic food supply, higher future food prices, increased rural poverty and social instability.

PeacePro therefore urged Nigerian authorities to publicly acknowledge the scale of agricultural capital destruction and immediately shift policy away from short term price suppression toward producer protection, capital preservation, and market stability.

He however said, “No country can bankrupt its farmers and remain food secure and Nigeria will soon pay the price for policy decisions that treated farmers as shock absorbers for inflation, if not corrected on time”.