Every harvest is also a seed

Hey, Hannatu here 👋

In 2023, a disease swept through Nigeria's ginger farms and cost farmers about $21 million.

Nearly three years later, Nigeria’s ginger industry still hasn't recovered.

To understand why it's taking this long, you have to know one unusual thing about ginger.

Unlike crops grown from fresh seeds each season, ginger is propagated from pieces of the previous harvest. 

Farmers carefully set aside healthy rhizomes from every harvest, and plant them again when the rains return.

Every harvest is both something to sell and something to save.

That simple fact turns every harvest into a difficult calculation.

If you sell everything, you earn more money today, but have nothing to plant tomorrow. But if you save your best rhizomes, you guarantee next year's harvest. 

Farmers have lived with that trade-off for generations. But in 2023, fungal blight turned it into a crisis.

When the disease swept through Southern Kaduna, it destroyed fields ready for harvest and wiped out the planting material farmers needed to begin again. 

This disrupted the cycle that had sustained Nigeria's ginger industry for decades.

Nearly three years later, Nigeria’s ginger farms are still being rebuilt. But to understand what was lost, you have to visit the home of ginger in Nigeria.

If ginger has a capital in Africa, it is Southern Kaduna.

The region's cool highlands, well-drained soils and moderate rainfall have made it one of the country's most productive ginger-growing belts.

For generations, farming communities across Kachia, Jaba, Kagarko, Kaura, Sanga and neighbouring local government areas have refined the craft, producing ginger prized for its strong aroma, high oil content and pungency.

Ask spice traders where the continent’s best ginger comes from, and many will point to Southern Kaduna without hesitation.

That reputation mattered beyond local markets.

Before the blight, Nigeria was consistently ranked among the world's leading ginger producers and exporters.

Depending on the year and dataset, it frequently competed with India, China and Nepal among the world's top producers. 

Ginger became one of Nigeria's most valuable non-oil agricultural exports, finding buyers across Europe, the Middle East and Asia, where its distinctive flavour earned a premium.

Entire local economies grew around the crop.

Transporters moved it. Processors dried it. Exporters shipped it. Families paid school fees with it.

For many communities across Southern Kaduna, ginger wasn't just another crop. It was the backbone of household incomes and one of the region's strongest economic engines.

If you grew up in Kaduna, some of your strongest memories will probably be scented with ginger. 

The breeze carried the sharp, spicy smell everywhere even before the farms came into view. 

You’d see the tall white bags being loaded onto trucks: ginger was gold. 

Then, almost without warning, that engine stalled.

A fungal disease known as ginger blight spread rapidly through major producing communities, attacking plants before harvest and leaving fields that had promised abundance almost empty.

Across thousands of hectares, healthy green plants yellowed, wilted and died.

Some farmers lost part of their harvest. Others lost almost everything.

Export volumes fell sharply. Industry groups estimated millions of dollars in losses as buyers struggled to source enough Nigerian ginger to meet demand. 

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) foreign trade data showed that Nigeria’s ginger exports declined from $17.3 million in 2023 to 4.5 million in 2024. In 2025, there was no recorded ginger export from Nigeria.

Nigeria went from exporting ginger to importing ginger in less than three years.

One bag of ginger that previously sold for around ₦100,000 ($70) reportedly climbed close to ₦1 million($700) at the height of the shortage. 

Consumers noticed immediately. So did food businesses, exporters, and manufacturers that depended on a reliable supply.

To most people, it looked like a simple story of supply and demand.

There wasn't enough ginger, and prices went up.

But that wasn’t all. A huge part of the crisis was that farmers didn’t have ginger to plant.

Ginger is propagated using healthy pieces of rhizome from the previous harvest. Every planting season depends on decisions made during the last harvest. Farmers are constantly balancing these two competing needs.

That balance disappeared after the blight.

The few farmers whose fields escaped the disease suddenly possessed something far more valuable than a market commodity. Every healthy rhizome represented another chance to rebuild.

Selling it meant immediate cash. Planting it meant another harvest. Many chose the latter.

Releasing everything into the market would have solved today's shortage but deepened next year's.

From the outside, it looked like farmers were holding back supply.

From their perspective, they were protecting the future.

The shortage lasted longer than many expected because the industry couldn't simply switch production back on. Ginger takes months to mature, and rebuilding seed stock takes even longer. 

Then fear entered the equation.

Many farmers who had watched entire fields disappear in 2023 decided not to plant ginger the following year at all. Some turned to other crops. Others waited to see whether the disease would return before risking another investment.

The blight had ended, but the uncertainty had not. And into that uncertainty, the internet walked in with its own explanations.

Scarcity rarely stays unexplained for long.

As ginger became harder to find, social media stepped in with its own answers. 

Videos and WhatsApp forwards claimed genetically modified ginger had quietly entered Nigeria. Others insisted the ginger now sold in markets was "plastic ginger" because it lacked the intense heat people associated with Southern Kaduna's crop.

Some even suggested foreign seeds had replaced Nigeria's traditional varieties.

What many consumers interpreted as "fake" ginger was often simply a different variety. 

Ginger changes as it matures. Rhizomes harvested after eight or nine months are noticeably milder than those left in the ground for more than a year.

Farmers in Southern Kaduna explained that older ginger has a sharper bite, while younger harvests retain a softer flavour. Soil and climate matter as well. 

The region's elevation, rainfall and well-drained soils have long given its ginger a distinctive pungency that buyers recognise almost instantly.

The mystery wasn't really a mystery. People were simply comparing different varieties, different harvest ages and different growing conditions without realizing it.

When farmers, researchers and government agencies fail to explain what is happening, someone else usually will. And they usually do it faster and louder. 

That communication gap is exactly what the government's recovery programme is now trying to close.

While consumers debated ginger on social media, researchers were confronting a different challenge.

How do you restart an industry whose planting material has been wiped out?

That question sits at the heart of the Federal Government's new Ginger Value Chain Recovery and Sustainability Programme, launched by the National Agricultural Development Fund (NADF) and the National Root Crops Research Institute.

The programme addresses three core weaknesses the outbreak exposed. 

Together, they are meant to rebuild something the industry had quietly depended on for decades but rarely discussed: trust in the seed itself.

That matters because the blight exposed vulnerabilities that extended well beyond a single disease. 

Nigeria's heavy reliance on uncertified planting material, weak disease surveillance, limited extension services, and fragmented seed systems had always been there. The outbreak merely made them impossible to ignore. 

Whether the recovery programme addresses them permanently is the question the next few seasons will answer.

Agriculture rarely recovers overnight.

Healthy rhizomes must be multiplied. Fields must be replanted. Farmers must wait through another growing season. Then they must decide, once again, how much to sell and how much to bury for the following year.

That process has already begun. Many farmers in Southern Kaduna have cautiously returned to ginger, encouraged by stronger prices and new support programmes. 

If disease remains under control, production is expected to continue improving over the next few seasons, gradually easing the shortages that have defined the market since 2023.

Whether Nigeria fully regains its position among the world's leading ginger exporters remains to be seen. 

Two questions for you this week.

If you're a consumer: did the ginger shortage change how you cook or what you buy?

If you're in the industry, a farmer, trader, exporter, or processor: how are things looking on the ground compared to two years ago? Are we actually recovering?

Send me your answers. And please forward this to anyone still convinced Nigerian ginger has been replaced. The real explanation is a lot more interesting than the conspiracy.

→ Let me know here.

Cheers,