The pre-oil agricultural economy
For most of the twentieth century, agriculture was the foundation of the Nigerian economy. Under British colonial administration (1861–1960), the colonial government organised farming around export crops rather than domestic food security, building research stations and extension services around cocoa, groundnut, cotton and palm oil destined for British and European markets S5. Regional specialisation followed the crops: the Western Region grew cocoa (and coffee), the Northern Region groundnut and grains, and the Eastern Region oil palm, while rubber came from the south-south S5S6. In the decade after independence, agriculture averaged 57.0% of GDP and generated 64.5% of Nigeria's export earnings between 1960 and 1969, with the country supplying an estimated 41% of West Africa's groundnut output — output visibly stored in Kano's famous groundnut pyramids S6. Cocoa production peaked at 400,000 metric tons in 1970 before the sector's fortunes turned S6
Decline after the oil boom
The discovery and rapid scale-up of crude oil exports through the 1970s reordered Nigeria's economic priorities. As petroleum revenue grew, government investment shifted away from farming, agricultural extension services weakened, and Nigeria moved from a net food exporter toward growing reliance on imports S5. The contraction shows up starkly in the export data: cocoa exports fell from their 1970 peak to 216,000 metric tons by 1976 and 150,000 metric tons by 1986, and one retrospective analysis found agriculture's average GDP share had fallen to 23.5% and its export-earnings share to just 5.1% by the years immediately preceding that analysis, a near-total reversal of the sector's earlier dominance S6. This "Dutch disease" pattern — a resource boom crowding out other tradeable sectors — has shaped Nigerian development debates ever since, and recurs in discussions of the oil gas industry and its outsized claim on foreign-exchange earnings relative to its GDP share S6
Where agriculture stands today
The National Bureau of Statistics' 2025 rebasing exercise, which moved the GDP base year from 2010 to 2019, raised agriculture's measured share of the economy: on the new methodology, agriculture accounted for 27.8% of nominal GDP in 2024, up from 22.1% under the old 2010-base series, making it one of the two or three largest sectors alongside services S2. Quarterly figures continue to show agriculture as a major, if seasonal, swing factor in headline growth. The NBS reported that agriculture grew 3.15% year-on-year in real terms in the first quarter of 2026 — a sharp rebound from just 0.07% growth in Q1 2025 — while the sector's real GDP contribution stood at 23.16% of aggregate output for the quarter, down from 28.6% in the seasonally stronger Q4 2025 harvest period S1. In nominal terms, the sector was valued at ₦11.87 trillion in Q1 2026, up from ₦11.51 trillion a year earlier S1. Crop production remains the dominant sub-sector, accounting for roughly two-thirds of the sector's nominal value (about ₦8.9 trillion in Q1 2026, itself growing 3.39% year-on-year), with livestock, forestry and fishing making up the remainder S1
Federal financing and policy interventions
Successive administrations have used the central bank of nigeria as a vehicle for agricultural credit policy rather than relying solely on the finance ministry or state governments. The Anchor Borrowers' Programme (ABP), launched by then-President Muhammadu Buhari on 17 November 2015, was designed to link smallholder farmers producing key commodities — chiefly maize, rice and wheat — to large-scale processors ("anchors") and participating banks, with the stated aims of boosting local production, stabilising input supply for agro-processors and reducing Nigeria's food import bill S3. The programme, implemented with the CBN-owned Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL) as a partner, disbursed roughly ₦1.12 trillion to about 4.67 million farmers through 563 registered anchors S4. By mid-2024, the House of Representatives had ordered a formal probe into the scheme after reporting that only around ₦546 billion of the disbursed funds had been repaid, and critics have characterised the programme's repayment record as evidence of weak loan-recovery discipline in state-directed agricultural finance S4. The CBN's own guidelines describe the scheme as demand-driven and still operating, connecting farmers to Deposit Money Banks and microfinance banks with no fixed maximum loan size, tied instead to a validated "Economics of Production" cost per hectare for each supported commodity S3
Structural constraints
Analysts tracking the sector point out that raw output growth alone is not resolving Nigeria's food-price pressures, because much of the final consumer cost is added after the farm gate rather than at production. Nigeria's food supply chains depend almost entirely on road haulage to move produce from northern growing areas such as Kano, Plateau and Benue to southern markets in Lagos, Port Harcourt and Abuja, so fuel-price spikes translate quickly into food inflation; the NBS's own transportation price sub-index rose 16.9% in March 2026 and remained near 16% in April 2026 as pump prices climbed S7. Separately, industry stakeholders estimate that between 30 and 40 million metric tonnes of food — roughly 40% of total agricultural output — are lost every year to post-harvest handling failures, poor storage and breakdowns in transit, at an estimated annual cost of ₦3.5–5 trillion, even as Nigeria's logistics sector itself contributes only about 3.73% of GDP S8. Truck drivers moving produce also report paying an estimated ₦150,000–250,000 per trip in levies at checkpoints along the route, a cost ultimately passed on to consumers, and these logistics bottlenecks compound with recurring farmer-herder land-use conflict in north-central Nigeria and insecurity affecting parts of the north-east and north-west as constraints on turning Nigeria's large cultivable land base and labour force into durable food security and export competitiveness S8