Oluyemi Oloyede
On 16 October, Nigeria marks Global Meals Day in opposition to an uncomfortable backdrop of numbers. The newest Cadre Harmonisé research, performed by way of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Meals Safety with the Meals and Agriculture Organisation and the Global Meals Programme, tasks that 34.7 million Nigerians will face acute meals lack of confidence between June and August 2026, up from 27.2 million these days.
Nigeria ranks a hundred and fifteenth out of 123 nations in this 12 months’s International Starvation Index, a “severe” starvation ranking. Those aren’t the numbers of a rustic wanting land, labour, or ambition. We have now by no means lacked agricultural possible. From fertile farmlands and numerous agro-ecological zones to in depth farm animals belts and colourful fisheries, our herbal endowment and human capital are able to maintaining a thriving country.
Regardless of this abundance, thousands and thousands of Nigerians face critical demanding situations in gaining access to satisfactory, nutritious, and reasonably priced meals.
As the worldwide group calls on us to innovate these days so we will be able to nourish the next day, this contradiction should compel us to seem previous uncooked harvest projections and confront a extra elementary operational truth: are we able to construct an built-in meals machine that reliably will get what we produce from the farm gate to the circle of relatives desk?
From the place I take a seat at the manufacturing unit flooring as a producer, meals safety does no longer start or finish with farming. It is dependent fully at the resilience and potency of the wider commercial cost chain.
A farmer wishes qualified and confirmed inputs, sensible financing, fashionable generation, and predictable offtake and pricing. A meals producer wishes a gentle provide of high-grade uncooked fabrics on the scale, consistency, and pricing required to stay manufacturing strains operating.
Shoppers, on the finish of the road, require secure, nutrient-dense merchandise that don’t spoil family budgets. Alongside those issues lie crucial operational dependencies: post-harvest aggregation, bloodless garage, commercial processing, number one transportation, secure power, and cold-chain distribution. Each hyperlink issues; when one fails, all of the machine fractures.
Believe the untapped alternatives and avoidable losses in our fruit-producing corridors. Nigeria cultivates an atypical number of end result, but we lose an estimated 35 to 40 million tonnes of meals every year, price greater than 3.5 trillion, a lot of it sooner than it ever reaches customers.
Perishables corresponding to fruit and veggies raise the best loss charges, continuously 40 to 50%, pushed by way of the absence of cold-chain logistics, rural garage, and fast processing infrastructure. End result are inherently perishable.
With out environment friendly rural aggregation centres and temperature-controlled delivery, harvest gluts briefly develop into catastrophic post-harvest waste. Nigeria’s personal agribusiness sector already displays what’s achievable: in Kaduna State, Tomato Jos has constructed an outgrower and processing type round kind of 500 smallholder tomato farmers, and a brand new $2.5 million funding from the EU’s agriculture financing facility this September will lend a hand it scale to one,500 farmers, just about quadruple fresh-tomato throughput by way of 2029, and raise farmer earning by way of greater than 150% over the similar length.
This isn’t a hypothetical repair; we’re development it these days in Northern Nigeria, and we want to reflect this or an identical fashions throughout native govt spaces and states in Nigeria for a couple of plants, beginning with probably the most impacted.
Construction an industrialised fruit- and vegetable-processing ecosystem adjustments this equation fully: it stabilises farmers’ earning, cushions seasonal marketplace shocks, and converts perishable harvests into shelf-stable, value-added merchandise that nourish customers all 12 months spherical.
The similar operational dynamic governs our farm animals and dairy ecosystem. Nigeria possesses one of the vital greatest farm animals herds in sub-Saharan Africa, but expanding our self-sufficiency in dairy and protein can’t be completed just by having extra livestock on open grazing routes. It calls for a synchronised, business infrastructure: qualified feed and fodder provides, systematic veterinary care, sanitary milking stations, rural milk assortment centres, and uninterrupted cold-chain logistics operating at once from pastoral communities to processing vegetation.
Globally, India’s Amul, a farmer-owned cooperative based in 1946, gives the template: it organised thousands and thousands of fragmented smallholders into village-level assortment and bloodless garage amenities, centres feeding central processing vegetation, and that community these days represents 3.6 million farmers and turns over greater than US$12 billion a 12 months, making it the sector’s greatest dairy cooperative.
Morocco’s COPAG, a cooperative based in Taroudant in 1987 and owned and run by way of its farmer-members, displays how some distance this type can pass: it changed into a self-sufficient FMCG industry that processes and sells what its contributors develop, led by way of the Jaouda dairy emblem, and reported about 8.1 billion dirhams in earnings in 2025, just about US$900 million.
Nigeria does no longer want to invent this type; it wishes the industrial will to construct it at this scale regionally. With out those bodily and logistical hyperlinks, the distance between home farm animals rearing and reasonably priced, in the community packaged dairy merchandise stays unnecessarily broad.
This is the reason agriculture and production can not perform in administrative or business silos; They’re commercial companions. Meals producers supply predictable, high-volume off-take for agricultural manufacturers; in flip, disciplined agricultural provide chains give you the uncooked fabrics had to amplify native commercial capability and change expensive imports.
When this dating matures, financial cost is created at each and every node, farmers acquire stable livelihoods, commercial processing creates professional employment, delivery operators run viable routes, Nigerian households acquire get admission to to healthy meals, and governments get taxes to offer social items.
Then again, native sourcing can’t stay a company slogan or an aspirational goal; it should make bloodless business sense for everybody concerned. For a producer, home uncooked fabrics should meet strict operational requirements of quantity, protection, hygiene, and price potency. For smallholder farmers and business growers, assembly the ones requirements calls for multi-year provide contracts, technical extension make stronger, devoted agricultural financing, and rural feeder roads.
Bridging this operational divide calls for coordinated, long-term partnerships connecting producers, business banks, building establishments, agricultural analysis our bodies, and farming clusters.
Thru all of this, accessibility should stay the defining benchmark of good fortune. Meals safety can’t merely imply that meals is bodily provide out there; it should imply that nutritious meals is realistically reasonably priced to bizarre running families.
Meals inflation has run close to, and from time to time above, 20% for many of 2026, easing most effective somewhat to 19.57% in August. Manufacturing price lists, risky power prices, haulage bottlenecks, finance fees, and packaging inputs all gather at once onto the overall retail worth.
Fixing the affordability puzzle due to this fact calls for addressing systemic operational friction alongside the road, somewhat than depending on momentary meals distribution interventions.
As a Nigerian meals and beverage corporate, C.H.I. Restricted operates on the middle of this interconnected panorama. Our day-to-day operations throughout foundational classes, from fruit drinks to dairy, persistently display that the way forward for Nigeria’s meals safety isn’t made up our minds only by way of what occurs inside the partitions of our factories. It’s formed by way of what occurs upstream lengthy sooner than uncooked fabrics succeed in our manufacturing unit gates, and downstream after packaged merchandise go away our loading docks.
In this Global Meals Day, it’s time to transfer previous the rhetoric of possible. Growth can’t be measured simply by way of general hectares cleared or nominal tonnes harvested.
The actual measure of meals sovereignty lies in how a lot of that harvest is processed regionally, how a lot waste is engineered out of the worth chain, how successfully merchandise transfer to shopper plates, how a lot of the remainder is exported, and what number of viable livelihoods are constructed within the procedure.
Nigeria has the land, the farmers, the farm animals, and an infinite shopper base.
We have now the economic capability to procedure what we develop. The pressing process is connecting those elements into an effective, resilient provide community. A country can’t devour possible. We should do the sensible paintings of turning possible into manufacturing, manufacturing into actual cost, and that cost into meals that reliably nourishes our folks.
*Oluyemi is the Government Director, Operations of Chivita Hollandia World (C.H.I. Restricted). He’s a seasoned industry and folks chief with in depth revel in in using sustainable enlargement, operational excellence, and high-performing, cross-functional groups. Previous to becoming a member of C.H.I. Restricted, he served as Managing Director and Leader Government Officer of UAC Meals Restricted and held senior management positions at Kerry Style & Vitamin, Kellogg and Procter & Gamble, the place he delivered sturdy operational and business effects. He’s recognised for his collaborative management taste, enlargement mindset, resilience, diligence and dedication to excellence and integrity.