Oluyemi Oloyede
On 16 October, Nigeria marks World Food Day in opposition to an uncomfortable backdrop of numbers. The newest Cadre Harmonisé evaluation, carried out by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security with the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Food Programme, tasks that 34.7 million Nigerians will face acute meals insecurity between June and August 2026, up from 27.2 million immediately.
Nigeria ranks one hundred and fifteenth out of 123 international locations on this yr’s Global Hunger Index, a “serious” starvation score. These will not be the numbers of a rustic quick of land, labour, or ambition. We have by no means lacked agricultural potential. From fertile farmlands and numerous agro-ecological zones to in depth livestock belts and vibrant fisheries, our pure endowment and human capital are succesful of sustaining a thriving nation.
Despite this abundance, hundreds of thousands of Nigerians face extreme challenges in accessing adequate, nutritious, and inexpensive meals.
As the worldwide group calls on us to innovate immediately so we will nourish tomorrow, this contradiction should compel us to look previous uncooked harvest projections and confront a extra basic operational actuality: can we construct an built-in meals system that reliably will get what we produce from the farm gate to the household desk?
From the place I sit on the manufacturing facility ground as a producer, meals safety doesn’t start or finish with farming. It relies upon fully on the resilience and effectivity of the broader industrial worth chain.
A farmer wants licensed and confirmed inputs, sensible financing, fashionable expertise, and predictable offtake and pricing. A meals producer wants a gentle provide of high-grade uncooked supplies on the scale, consistency, and pricing required to maintain manufacturing strains working.
Consumers, on the finish of the road, require protected, nutrient-dense merchandise that don’t break family budgets. Along these factors lie essential operational dependencies: post-harvest aggregation, chilly storage, industrial processing, major transportation, steady power, and cold-chain distribution. Every hyperlink issues; when one fails, the whole system fractures.
Consider the untapped alternatives and avoidable losses in our fruit-producing corridors. Nigeria cultivates a unprecedented selection of fruits, but we lose an estimated 35 to 40 million tonnes of meals yearly, price greater than 3.5 trillion, a lot of it earlier than it ever reaches shoppers.
Perishables similar to vegetables and fruit carry the very best loss charges, usually 40 to 50%, pushed by the absence of cold-chain logistics, rural storage, and speedy processing infrastructure. Fruits are inherently perishable.
Without environment friendly rural aggregation centres and temperature-controlled transport, harvest gluts rapidly flip into catastrophic post-harvest waste. Nigeria’s personal agribusiness sector already reveals what’s achievable: in Kaduna State, Tomato Jos has constructed an outgrower and processing mannequin round roughly 500 smallholder tomato farmers, and a recent $2.5 million funding from the EU’s agriculture financing facility this September will assist it scale to 1,500 farmers, almost quadruple fresh-tomato throughput by 2029, and carry farmer incomes by greater than 150% over the identical interval.
This isn’t a hypothetical repair; we’re constructing it immediately in Northern Nigeria, and we have to replicate this or related fashions throughout native authorities areas and states in Nigeria for a number of crops, beginning with probably the most impacted.
Building an industrialised fruit- and vegetable-processing ecosystem modifications this equation fully: it stabilises farmers’ incomes, cushions seasonal market shocks, and converts perishable harvests into shelf-stable, value-added merchandise that nourish shoppers all yr spherical.
The identical operational dynamic governs our livestock and dairy ecosystem. Nigeria possesses one of the most important livestock herds in sub-Saharan Africa, but rising our self-sufficiency in dairy and protein can’t be achieved just by having extra cattle on open grazing routes. It calls for a synchronised, business infrastructure: licensed feed and fodder provides, systematic veterinary care, sanitary milking stations, rural milk assortment centres, and uninterrupted cold-chain logistics working instantly from pastoral communities to processing crops.
Globally, India’s Amul, a farmer-owned cooperative based in 1946, affords the template: it organised hundreds of thousands of fragmented smallholders into village-level assortment and chilly storage services, centres feeding central processing crops, and that community immediately represents 3.6 million farmers and turns over greater than US$12 billion a yr, making it the world’s largest dairy cooperative.
Morocco’s COPAG, a cooperative based in Taroudant in 1987 and owned and run by its farmer-members, reveals how far this mannequin can go: it turned a self-sufficient FMCG enterprise that processes and sells what its members develop, led by the Jaouda dairy model, and reported about 8.1 billion dirhams in income in 2025, near US$900 million.
Nigeria doesn’t have to invent this mannequin; it wants the business will to construct it at this scale domestically. Without these bodily and logistical hyperlinks, the hole between home livestock rearing and inexpensive, regionally packaged dairy merchandise stays unnecessarily broad.
This is why agriculture and manufacturing can not function in administrative or business silos; They are industrial companions. Food producers present predictable, high-volume off-take for agricultural producers; in flip, disciplined agricultural provide chains present the uncooked supplies wanted to develop native industrial capability and substitute expensive imports.
When this relationship matures, financial worth is created at each node, farmers acquire regular livelihoods, industrial processing creates expert employment, transport operators run viable routes, Nigerian households acquire entry to healthful meals, and governments get taxes to supply social items.
However, native sourcing can not stay a company slogan or an aspirational goal; it should make chilly business sense for everybody concerned. For a producer, home uncooked supplies should meet strict operational requirements of quantity, security, hygiene, and price effectivity. For smallholder farmers and business growers, assembly these requirements requires multi-year provide contracts, technical extension assist, devoted agricultural financing, and rural feeder roads.
Bridging this operational divide requires coordinated, long-term partnerships connecting producers, business banks, growth establishments, agricultural analysis our bodies, and farming clusters.
Through all of this, accessibility should stay the defining benchmark of success. Food safety can not merely imply that meals is bodily current available in the market; it should imply that nutritious meals is realistically inexpensive to abnormal working households.
Food inflation has run close to, and at instances above, 20% for most of 2026, easing solely barely to 19.57% in August. Production tariffs, risky power prices, haulage bottlenecks, finance fees, and packaging inputs all accumulate instantly onto the ultimate retail value.
Solving the affordability puzzle due to this fact requires addressing systemic operational friction alongside the road, relatively than counting on short-term meals distribution interventions.
As a Nigerian meals and beverage firm, C.H.I. Limited operates on the coronary heart of this interconnected panorama. Our each day operations throughout foundational classes, from fruit drinks to dairy, persistently present that the long run of Nigeria’s meals safety isn’t determined solely by what occurs inside the partitions of our factories. It is formed by what occurs upstream lengthy earlier than uncooked supplies attain our manufacturing facility gates, and downstream after packaged merchandise depart our loading docks.
On this World Food Day, it’s time to transfer previous the rhetoric of potential. Progress can’t be measured merely by whole hectares cleared or nominal tonnes harvested.
The true measure of meals sovereignty lies in how a lot of that harvest is processed domestically, how a lot waste is engineered out of the worth chain, how effectively merchandise transfer to shopper plates, how a lot of the remaining is exported, and what number of viable livelihoods are constructed within the course of.
Nigeria has the land, the farmers, the livestock, and an enormous shopper base.
We have the economic capability to course of what we develop. The pressing job is connecting these elements into an environment friendly, resilient provide community. A nation can not eat potential. We should do the sensible work of turning potential into manufacturing, manufacturing into actual worth, and that worth into meals that reliably nourishes our individuals.
*Oluyemi is the Executive Director, Operations of Chivita Hollandia International (C.H.I. Limited). He is a seasoned enterprise and other people chief with in depth expertise in driving sustainable progress, operational excellence, and high-performing, cross-functional groups. Prior to becoming a member of C.H.I. Limited, he served as Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of UAC Foods Limited and held senior management positions at Kerry Taste & Nutrition, Kellogg and Procter & Gamble, the place he delivered robust operational and business outcomes. He is recognised for his collaborative management type, progress mindset, resilience, diligence and dedication to excellence and integrity.
