How Nigeria Ate Its Farms

Hey, Hannatu here 👋

Here’s a fact for you: in 1960, Nigeria was a net food exporter.

The country produced more food than it consumed.

Cocoa mountains in the West. Groundnut pyramids in the North. Oil palm heaps in the East.

Food exports made up over 70% of Nigeria's Gross National Product, and the country fed itself and exported the surplus. 

Twenty-five years later, Nigeria was importing over 50% of the food it consumed.

What happened in one generation? 

Let’s dive into…

How did Nigeria move from a net exporter to being dependent on food imports?

It’s simple. Three things happened at exactly the same time: 

The Nigerian Civil War raged on for over three years. 

For 30 months, from 1967 - 1970, farms were abandoned across the country, especially in the Southeast, where the conflict was strongest. 

Agricultural infrastructure was destroyed, and food production had collapsed.

At the same time, the oil boom flooded Nigeria's economy with petrodollars. 

Oil prices rose from $3.78 per barrel in October 1973 to $14.69 per barrel by the beginning of 1974. 

Nigeria’s revenue went from $411 million in 1970 to $26.62 billion in 1980.

Nigeria suddenly had enormous spending power to import whatever the country needed. 

In fact, then-President General Yakubu Gowon famously said, “Nigeria’s problem isn’t money. But how to spend it.”

Coincidentally, America had a problem: it had mountains of surplus wheat that it had overproduced. 

They needed somewhere to dump it.

Here’s what you need to know about dumping.

Dumping occurs when a country exports a product at a price below its domestic price.

If the export price is lower than this constructed value, it's considered dumping.

Bottom line: Dumping means selling abroad for less than what's fair, either compared to your home price or compared to what it actually costs to produce and transport.

And that's exactly what happened when American wheat flooded Nigerian markets.

Wheat imports into Nigeria exploded. 

In the 1960s, Nigeria imported an average of 75,000 metric tons of wheat. 

This was mostly for the elite and foreigners still living in the country. 

By the early 1970s, when this dump began, this number climbed to 200,000. 

By the early 80s, the annual three-year average reached 1,350,000 tonnes. It reached a peak year in 1981 with over 1.5 million tons imported. 

The wheat came on concessional terms like low-interest loans, grants, "food aid" that wasn't really aid.

American wheat was even subsidised twice: first by U.S. government agricultural subsidies, then again through Nigeria's cheap foreign exchange and favorable import terms. 

Nigerian crops like yam required land, labor, storage, and transport, which were all expensive and unreliable post-war. 

But imported wheat flour? That just needed port infrastructure and distribution.

Bread made from American wheat became cheaper than food grown in Nigerian soil. 

The entire agricultural economy flipped. 

Urban Nigerians started to normalise eating bread for breakfast more often than akara or masa. 

It was modern, but it was also convenient and had a longer shelf life. 

You didn't need to fry, grind, or peel. You just needed to unwrap and eat. 

While urban Nigerians embraced this convenience, nobody was watching what was happening to the farms.

Nigeria, at independence in 1960, was the world's largest producer and exporter of groundnuts and palm oil. 

The country was the second-largest exporter of cocoa after Ghana, and the largest exporter of cotton in West Africa. 

Agricultural exports collectively accounted for over 90% of GDP.

By 1974, Nigeria's food import bill had tripled. 

By the end of the 1980s, food imports had increased from $509.79 million in 1964 to 9.6 billion. 

Between 1973 and 1980, there was an overall annual decline in agricultural production, while the GDP growth rate was more than halved.

Agriculture's share of GDP fell from roughly 60% in 1960 to under 25% by 1980.

Domestic food production couldn't compete with cheap imports. Farmers abandoned food crops for export crops (cocoa, palm oil) or left farming entirely. 

Youth migration to cities accelerated because why farm when imported food is cheaper?

The oil boom made this economically rational in the short term. 

Nigeria had foreign exchange to buy food from anywhere. Farming looked like hard work for little reward when oil money could just import everything. 

The government shifted agricultural policy from peasant-produced food crops to mechanized farming for elite landowners who were mainly retired military officers, bureaucrats, and wealthy business people.

By the time anyone realised what was happening, Nigeria had already fallen into a...

Nigeria became structurally dependent on wheat imports. 

Bakeries were built around imported wheat. 

Pasta factories, biscuit manufacturers, and entire food industries started to emerge based on wheat they didn't grow. 

In 1985 (around the time my manager, Timi, was born), wheat consumption peaked at 1.5 million tonnes.

Attempts to substitute cassava flour for wheat failed. 

Consumers rejected the taste and texture of cassava flour. 

And the food culture had changed. 

Nigerian children growing up in the 1970s and 1980s expected bread for breakfast, not tubers. 

Once consumer preferences shifted, reversing them became nearly impossible.

When oil prices crashed in 1986 from $35 per barrel in 1980 to less than $10 in 1986, Nigeria couldn't afford wheat imports anymore.  

The next year, the government imposed a ban on wheat importation. 

The import ban stimulated efforts to increase local wheat production, which reached a peak of 140,000 tonnes in 1987. 

But this was insufficient to meet even the temporarily decreased demand. 

Nigeria now imports $2 billion worth of wheat annually. Virtually 99% of wheat consumed is imported. 

Bread, noodles, and pasta are now staples for urban Nigerians. 

The consumption of wheat in Nigeria has been increasing due to population growth and the increasing demand for quick and easy-to-make fast foods.

Now, farmers in Nigeria do farm wheat. 

But domestic wheat production in Nigeria has constantly fought environmental incompatibility. 

Wheat, being a temperate crop, requires cold climates during the growing season to thrive. 

This has limited the wheat growing season in Nigeria to the cool harmattan period, starting from November to March, and the wheat growing areas in Nigeria to only about 5 out of 36 states. 

Despite their efforts, domestic wheat production in Nigeria has been unable to keep pace with the growing demand for wheat. 

In the 2021/2022 harvest season, Nigerian farmers harvested 360,000 metric tons of wheat, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.

That year, Nigerians consumed approximately 5.85 to 6 million metric tons of wheat.

In other words, Nigeria built an entire food culture around a crop it can barely grow.

But while the country debates food imports and import bans, a quieter transformation has been happening in the background.

A new generation of startups is trying to rebuild the systems Nigerian agriculture lost decades ago.

A generation that grew up inside Nigeria's food dependency crisis is trying to rebuild the agricultural system using technology, logistics, finance, and data.

Not by romanticising farming, but by treating agriculture like infrastructure.

Because the real problem was never just that Nigeria imported wheat.

The problem was that the country stopped investing in the systems that make local food production competitive.

So instead of asking, “How do we grow more food?” A new wave of startups is asking a different question: how do we make local food economically viable again?

That distinction matters.

Take ThriveAgric.

The company operates across the agricultural value chain: financing farmers, distributing inputs, providing insurance, connecting farmers to buyers, and helping aggregate production at scale.

For decades, many Nigerian farmers were trapped in a cycle where they couldn't access loans because farming was seen as risky, but farming stayed risky because nobody invested in them.

ThriveAgric’s model tries to close that loop.

Then there’s Releaf, which focused on one of Nigeria’s historic export strengths: palm oil.

Nigeria was once one of the world’s largest palm oil exporters. Today, the country imports palm oil despite having the right climate to dominate the sector.

Releaf’s thesis is that the bottleneck isn’t production alone. It’s processing.

The company builds technology and processing infrastructure closer to farmers so crops can be processed faster, waste is reduced, and local supply chains become more efficient.

In other words: fixing agriculture after harvest, not just before it.

Then there’s AFEX, which attacked another invisible problem: markets.

One reason Nigerian agriculture struggled for decades is that farmers often had no reliable storage, poor price transparency, and unstable access to buyers.

This meant many farmers were forced to sell immediately after harvest when prices were lowest.

AFEX built a commodities exchange and warehousing network that lets farmers store produce safely, access financing using stored crops as collateral, and sell later at better prices.

That sounds boring until you realise something important: countries with strong agricultural economies usually have strong commodity infrastructure.

America doesn’t just grow wheat. It has grain elevators, commodity exchanges, rail systems, crop insurance, futures markets, storage networks, and financing systems built around agriculture.

Nigeria historically focused on the farming part while neglecting the infrastructure around farming.

Even startups like Farmcrowdy played an important psychological role. The company helped make agriculture feel investable again to urban Nigerians who had mentally disconnected from farming entirely.

That shift matters more than it sounds.

Nigeria’s agricultural collapse didn’t happen because Nigerians forgot how to farm.

It happened because the country stopped treating agriculture as infrastructure.

The wheat imports solved an immediate problem in the 1970s: feeding a post-war population quickly and cheaply.

But fifty years later, Nigeria is still living with the consequences of that shortcut.

Every naira crash now raises food prices. Every global supply chain shock becomes a national emergency. Every conflict thousands of kilometers away suddenly affects the price of bread in Kano or Lagos.

The real question is no longer whether Nigeria can grow enough wheat. The real question is whether the country can rebuild the systems that make local food production competitive again.

Storage. Logistics. Processing. Commodity markets. Rural roads. Agricultural finance.

That’s what companies like ThriveAgric, Releaf, and AFEX are really building.

Infrastructure for food sovereignty.

Because countries rarely lose agricultural power overnight. They lose it one policy choice at a time.

And maybe they rebuild it the same way.

Which Nigerian startup or industry do you think has the best chance of rebuilding local food production?

👉🏾Tell me here.

Cheers,