Currently saddled with the task of meeting United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of reducing poverty in all its forms and dimensions by at least half in 2030, the latest Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) few days ago revealed that the country is nowhere near the projection of reducing multidimensional poverty, as both the proportion of people affected and their total number are rising at an alarming rate.

The findings come amid continued concern over the rising cost of living and the pressure on household welfare in the country. Only in April 2026, the World Bank reported that Nigeria’s poverty rate had increased from 56 per cent in 2023 to 63 per cent in 2025, leaving about 140 million people in poverty.

The bank attributed the trend partly to household incomes failing to keep pace with rising living costs and weak growth in agriculture, a sector that provides livelihoods for many poor Nigerians.

Currently, millions of Nigerians are grappling with food insecurity to the rising poverty, hunger and declining public confidence, with many households being pushed to the brink and on the verge of eating from the wastes bins.

Hence, on the occasion of this year’s food day commemoration, with the theme, “Innovate Today, Nourish Tomorrow,” rather than optimism on food and other agro-based commodities price drop, the revelation from stakeholders indicate a situation of hopelessness.

They told The Guardian that while climate change is having its toll on farmers, with excess rain and longer periods of drought becoming order of the day, the cost of inputs and others has reduced the number of practicing farmers, as those left in the profession can barely afford it, hence, the low yields from their efforts.

Celebrated yearly on October 16 across the globe, the day provides an important opportunity for the global community to renew its commitment to the fight against hunger, malnutrition and food insecurity.

The day also commemorates the founding of FAO of the United Nations in 1945, reflecting the enduring global effort to build food systems that can adequately nourish present and future generations.

Beyond the commemoration, the day serves as a rallying point for governments, development partners, farmers, private-sector actors, researchers, innovators and communities to work together towards sustainable food systems and a future where everyone has access to sufficient, safe, nutritious and affordable food.

According to the world body, ending hunger is within reach. The world already produces enough food to nourish everyone, yet 645 million people still face hunger, and 2.69 billion cannot afford a healthy diet.

In Nigeria, stakeholders and industry players believe that ending hunger in the country is within reach, especially owing to the large expanse of arable land across the geo-political zones, the population and temperate weather condition, however, conflict, economic instability and climate shocks put pressure on agrifood systems, therefore, the challenge is how to ensure access to reliable, affordable and nutritious food for the citizens across the country.

For Nigeria to feed its growing population, innovation is no longer an option but a necessity. This shows the urgent need to continuously explore new and smarter ways of increasing agricultural productivity, reducing post-harvest losses, improving processing and storage, strengthening food distribution networks, expanding market access, creating decent employment opportunities to tackle the menace of food insecurity.

This year’s theme, ‘Innovate Today, Nourish Tomorrow’, is a call for renewed commitment to innovation, technology, research and sustainable practices across the agricultural value chain.

The Federal Government policies appear to be only on paper. For successive administrations, it’s being a case of motion without movement, as none of the launched initiatives seemed to be working.

For instance, the National Agricultural Technology and Innovation Policy (NATIP) 2022–2027 was launched to address the changing dynamics in the agricultural sector owing to climate change.

The five-year policy seeks to improve agricultural productivity through research, mechanisation, extension services, irrigation, digital agriculture and climate-smart farming.

Unfortunately, four years down the lane, the uptake of technology by Nigerian farmers remains at its lowest ebb, particularly, in mechanisation, irrigation, improved seeds and digital farming tools.

According to the 2024 statistics from FAO, less than one per cent of farming households owned tractors. Another report by the organisation in 2025 showed that 70 per cent of farmers still depend on crude implements.

Reports have it that only three states have tractors for farming. Unfortunately, where these tractors and other equipment are available, the cost of hiring them is far beyond the reach of these farmers.

Investigations showed that the average rental rate of a tractor, which was around N80, 000 per day in 2023, covering about 10 hours of work, increased to N205, 000 per day in 2025. This increase hinged on several factors – rising fuel costs, inflation, higher maintenance expenses, and the increasing cost of spare parts.

Even, the farmers who have the funds to acquire the tractors are being frustrated by government policies, especially the exorbitant tariff placed on imports. For instance, one of the stakeholders, Nnaemeka Obiaraeri, said he cleared a tractor he bought for N33m, with a whooping sum of N15m.

On the issue of improved seedling, a review of the Nigerian seed system by some agricultural scientists put the adoption of improved seeds by rural farmers at nine per cent, while about 42 per cent of farmers still use inorganic fertilisers.

Some of the challenges attributed to this problem include inconsistent seed quality, limited regulatory oversight, and inadequate awareness among farmers. These gaps have hindered the effective adoption of quality seeds, including biofortified varieties that can combat malnutrition.

The adverse effect of climate change is another big issue. While it appears Nigerian farmers are embracing climate-resilient crop varieties, the adoption is very slow. The recent climate-related disruptions in some parts of the country laid credence to this, as crops were destroyed either by flooding or drought. While drought-resistant maize, high-yield cassava and improved rice varieties are gaining tractions among farmers in serious countries, the Federal Government is still paying lip service to this.

Though the advent of agro-tech innovations like Thrive Agric and Farmcrowdy, among others, is on the rise in the country, to revolutionise the agricultural landscape, helping rural farmers gain access to funding, market and technical expertise, providing them with real-time weather updates, and agricultural best practices, it’s still like a drop in the ocean because their interventions and penetrations is still in the surface compared to large number of farmers in the country.

Experts claim that while the advancement in mechanisation and technology are encouraging, challenges such as poor infrastructure, inadequate storage facilities, access to arable land and post-harvest losses have been serious challenges drawing back the level of progress.

The administration of Muhammadu Buhari made a renewed focus aimed towards repositioning the sector through initiatives like the Anchor Borrowers Programmes (ABP). It was a laudable initiative that provided opportunities for small-scale farmers to get soft loans to improve their farming techniques and expand their businesses, but the scheme was squandered as most of the funds got into the hands of ‘political farmers’, while several millions of naira remained unpaid till date.

The Founder of Menitos Farm Depot, Lagos, Toluwalope Daramola, said though the lingering food crisis is mostly put down to insecurity and climate change, the efforts to transfer the country’s agriculture sovereignty cannot be ignored, as it has also been a factor to the issue of food crisis.

“Small farmers are steadily getting pushed out by big firms and they are more profit oriented and cannot be bothered with food availability. To change things in the sector, we need to farm with the consciousness of climate change. We need to adapt to round-the-year farming and also invest in processing. We need a system that does not place farmers’ investment and food availability at the mercy of a currently dynamic climate,” she said.

The Strategic Communications Lead of Keselash Agricom, Feyikemi Adurogbangba, attributed the low uptake of innovations by Nigerian farmers to poor communication and inadequate storytelling about agricultural innovations.

She said, “we believe communication should be treated as critical infrastructure for scaling and sustaining innovation in the food system.”

“Beyond creating visibility, impact-driven and human-centred storytelling can document what works, share lessons from implementation, build trust, connect stakeholders and foster the partnerships and collaborations needed to replicate successful solutions in other communities and contexts.

“When we tell the stories of farmers, innovators, researchers, businesses and institutions, we do more than showcase achievements. We help others understand what is possible, learn from experience and identify opportunities to invest, collaborate and build on existing progress.”

She emphasised that agricultural innovation could help boost food production and reduce food loss, but maintained that its long-term impact depended on the ability to share knowledge, strengthen connections and ensure that proven solutions reached more people.

Adurogbangba added, “if we want to innovate today for a sustainable tomorrow, we must not only invest in developing solutions; we must also invest in communicating them effectively.”

The Managing Director of Arzikin Noma Africa, Adeoluwa Michael Adesola, emphasised the need to develop a 10-year sustainable agricultural development roadmap to get the sector out of this debacle.

He said the roadmap should be developed by the government, development finance institutions and the private sector, in collaboration with young people and women, to promote climate-smart agriculture by leveraging technology and irrigation for year-round farming, rather than relying on a single cycle of rain-fed planting.

On his part, the Managing Director of Green Sahara Farms, Suleiman Dikwa, stressed the need for Nigeria to embrace a biocircular economy to rebuild its wealth.

According to him, if Nigeria must escape the chronic cycle of boom-and-bust petro-dependency, it must stop looking beneath the ground for its salvation and start looking across its surface.

He stated that true economic sovereignty lay in an aggressive national shift towards two interlocking engines: the biocircular economy and the carbon opportunity approach.

“This is not a romantic environmental crusade. It is a hard-nosed industrial strategy,” he said.

“Consider the stark paradox of our current system. Across Nigeria’s agrarian belts, millions of metric tonnes of agricultural residues—rice husks in Kebbi, cassava peelings across Ogun and Oyo, and palm oil effluent throughout Edo—are routinely discarded or set ablaze. In burning them, we do not merely pollute our skies; we incinerate capital. In a circular bioeconomy, these residues cease to be waste. They become feedstock.”

He said, “decentralised biomass refining could instantly transform agricultural waste into clean industrial heat, biofertilisers and green construction materials. By converting farm waste into biochar—a charcoal-like substance that sequesters carbon for centuries while reviving our degraded, nutrient-depleted topsoils—we can restore our domestic food basket in the Middle Belt.

“In doing so, we also generate durable, high-integrity carbon removal credits that institutional global buyers will purchase at a premium.”

Dikwa added that Nigeria must simultaneously confront its crippling energy deficit through circular innovation.

“Instead of burning scarce foreign exchange on imported petroleum fuels and diesel for backup generators, we have the raw biological fuel to produce domestic bio-compressed natural gas (Bio-CNG). Commercial anaerobic digesters utilising abattoir waste and agricultural runoff can power local trucking fleets, run farm-processing equipment and electrify agro-industrial clusters entirely off-grid.”

Speaking on the untapped economic potential of Nigeria’s natural geography and its carbon opportunities, he said, “Too often, Nigerian debates frame climate action as a restrictive compliance cost imposed by industrialised nations. This perspective fundamentally misreads the moment. Decarbonisation is the fastest-growing asset class on Earth. Nigeria happens to possess one of Africa’s largest natural carbon vaults: the mangrove ecosystems of the Niger Delta and the coastal wetlands of the Atlantic seaboard.”

“Mangroves capture carbon at rates four to 10 times faster than terrestrial tropical forests. Where oil spills and illegal refining have scarred coastal communities, high-integrity ‘blue carbon’ restoration projects can deliver direct economic injections. Under credible international frameworks, restoring these wetlands can generate tradable carbon assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars, while rebuilding artisanal fisheries and creating coastal storm defences against sea-level rise.”

“In the north, integrating cash-yielding indigenous species like shea and gum arabic into our Great Green Wall shelterbelts can transform desertification barriers into commercial agroforestry hubs that also export certified carbon credits.”

Dikwa stated that three deliberate steps were essential if Nigeria was to seize this opportunity.

Firstly, he called for legal clarity on carbon property rights. He said the National Council on Climate Change (NCCC) must finalise enforceable rules specifying who owns the carbon in the country’s soil, trees and wetlands, while ensuring transparent national registries and equitable revenue-sharing models for host communities. According to him, ambiguity breeds exploitation and discourages long-term investment.

Secondly, he called for smart industrial financing, urging sovereign wealth mechanisms and domestic development banks to structure blended-finance facilities to reduce risks for private-sector investments in waste-to-energy digesters and circular refining plants.

Thirdly, he advocated local market creation, saying circularity required domestic demand. He said mandating minimum thresholds for recycled materials in corporate packaging and prioritising locally produced biofertilisers in government agricultural schemes would establish reliable domestic supply chains.

However, experts, especially nutritionists have sounded a note of caution on the importance of food safety, in the country’s search for various innovations to boost food security.

The warning is coming on the heel of reports on farmers’ usage of harmful chemicals – herbicides, pesticides and others, to increase yields and maximise profits, often without sufficient regard to the health of Nigerians.

According to the WHO, pesticides are classified as extremely hazardous (Class Ia), highly hazardous (Class Ib), moderately hazardous (Class II), slightly hazardous (Class III) and unlikely to be hazardous under short-term use (Class U).

Research reveals that for some extremely harzadous pesticides, just 5ml taken into the mouth is sufficient to kill an adult. It has been well documented that small-scale farmers in developing countries use large amounts of pesticides belonging to classes Ia, Ib, and II due to these being cheaper than the less hazardous, newer ones.

Experts say with this, newer safer formulations tend to be more expensive because they are protected by foreign patents, and local firms are not permitted to formulate them without paying heavy charges which eventually drive up market prices.

Until recent years, the prevalence of cancer, kidney-related ailments, reproductive organ malfunctioning and other life-threatening diseases were not so endemic among Nigerians, especially youths, who have become easy prey to these diseases.

One area that has been of great concern and major contributory factor to this problem, which little or no attention is paid to, is the issue of crop protection, particularly, abuse of agrochemicals on plants.

Investigations revealed that some these agrochemicals that have been restricted and banned in industrialised countries have found their way into many third world countries, including Nigeria, where the farmers churn out ‘poisoned’ crops to unsuspecting consumers.

A crop protectionist from the Institute for Agriculture Research (IAR), Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, Kaduna State, Prof. Rabiu Adamu, who confirmed that pesticides are often toxic to humans, said nine highly-persistent pesticides – aldrin, chlordane, DDT, dieldrin, endrin, heptachlor, mirex, toxaphene, and hexachlorobenzene have been officially banned from use in agriculture.

He regretted that several of these are still openly sold in Nigeria, while some are smuggled in or even donated by some ‘caring’ donor countries. “Sometimes, the pesticides were donated while their use was still permitted, but a combination of excessive donation and poor logistics or timing results in delays in receiving the pesticides at the point of need, and they become “obsolete” while in stock, despite this, people still go ahead to use them.”

Adamu reiterated that “depending on the type and class, pesticides can contribute to neurological, respiratory, immunologic, and reproductive health problems, as well as cancer, immune system damage, and increased risk of sickness in the short term.

“These unintended consequences may be most true of pesticides – like insecticides, fungicides and herbicides – many of which are known to be toxic to humans, particularly, when over-applied or used without appropriate protective equipment.”

A sustainable development expert, environmental activist and campaigner, Donald Ikenna Ofoegbu, raised the need for all farmers to ensure that food is produced in line with best agronomic practices, amid this safety concerns.

He said beyond the economic cost of food production, Nigeria must address the shrinking agricultural labour force, noting that fewer people were engaged in agriculture and that mechanisation had yet to reach a level suited to smallholder farmers.

“This is particularly important in Nigeria, where our agricultural system is dominated by smallholder farmers, many of whom are women. Many of these farmers also face challenges with access to land and agricultural mechanisation.

“Why do farmers use these chemicals? They were once considered useful, but we now know that many of them are extremely hazardous. Farmers know this as well, yet they seem stuck with the mindset that if they do not use these chemicals, they have no viable alternatives.

“The reality, however, is that alternatives exist. The challenge is that many of these alternatives have not been developed to a commercial scale. If we want farmers to adopt safer agricultural practices, we must ensure that these alternatives are scalable and commercially viable. This requires deliberate government investment in alternatives such as organic agriculture and agroecological practices.

“The government must also provide incentives to encourage the adoption of good agricultural practices. There must be checks and balances because, if people know that there are no penalties or sanctions for doing the wrong thing, they may continue to pollute the environment without consequences.

“We must ensure that polluters are held accountable, regardless of how big or small they are. When people understand that there are consequences for harmful practices, it will encourage behavioural change.

“However, this behavioural change must ultimately reflect the realities of agriculture. Otherwise, we risk creating food insecurity. To ensure food safety, the first step is to make sure that knowledge reaches everyone. Farmers need to understand good agronomic practices, integrated pest management and integrated weed management.”

Continuing, Ofoegbu stressed: “These practices must be scaled up through the efforts of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, state ministries of agriculture, local councils, agricultural practitioners, farm schools and research institutions.

“Our research institutions are not conducting enough research that directly addresses the needs of local farmers. We need to align agricultural research with farmers’ needs and provide adequate funding to ensure that research can transform local food systems sustainably.

“We are currently mapping organic agriculture, agroecology and circular farming systems to identify existing alternatives. Once these solutions have been identified, the government, development partners and agricultural research institutions must work together to replicate and scale up successful farms and practices. We must also develop training and youth empowerment programmes around these existing agricultural practices, building on approaches that have already proved successful.

“There must be an enabling environment, supported by appropriate policies and incentives for organic agriculture. Farmers who produce food in ways that protect human health, restore the environment and promote sustainable agriculture should receive adequate support and compensation.”

Ofoegbu said this would require subsidies and investment, noting that much of the support provided by federal and state governments, as well as non-state actors, had gone into conventional agriculture, particularly the supply of synthetic chemicals and fertilisers, rather than organic agriculture and agroecology.

“The executive and the legislature have committed substantial resources to conventional agricultural practices. We need to examine how some of these funds can be redirected towards safer and more sustainable farming methods.

“Investment in storage systems is also very important. We need to support safe storage practices, including hermetic bags and other appropriate technologies that help preserve agricultural produce.

“We should also invest in small, decentralised and modular storage facilities on farms and in markets. These facilities can help reduce post-harvest losses and improve food safety. Monitoring and surveillance are equally important. We have conducted tests in several markets and found significant pesticide residues in food produce.

“Market management authorities, food associations, farmers’ associations, commodity associations and traders’ groups must therefore take responsibility for monitoring their members and ensuring that food sold and stored in local markets meets appropriate safety and hygiene standards.

“These groups must check that their members handle and store agricultural commodities safely. Any violations should be reported to the relevant authorities.”

Ofoegbu also emphasised the need to strengthen sanctions for food safety violations, noting that such issues directly affected human lives.”Families are spending huge amounts of money on healthcare and, in some cases, are being pushed into poverty by the cost of treating illnesses associated with what they consume. Some people require expensive treatments, including dialysis, placing a significant financial burden on households.

“The government also spends substantial amounts on healthcare, including efforts to subsidise dialysis for patients with kidney disease. Rather than spending so much money treating illnesses that could be prevented, we should invest more in preventing food contamination and encouraging safer agricultural practices.

“We should redirect some of the resources spent on healthcare towards supporting and compensating farmers who produce food safely. Ultimately, encouraging farmers to adopt safer practices, investing in sustainable agriculture and strengthening food safety monitoring will help protect public health and reduce the financial burden of preventable illnesses,” he stated.

On her part, Daramola, an advocate of organic farming, said the country should at all cost disagree with all poor unsustainable standards in the sector.

“I am an advocate of organic farming as against Genetically Modified crops and livestock to prevent diseases. Some of the countries thriving now got their start off seeds from us and have evolved to stronger species through cross breeding livestock, and grafting stems, all these long before the arrival of GMO. Some of these countries are banning GMO to even avoid cross pollination.

“I don’t think we need to agree to poor unsustainable standards packaged as foreign investment. It would only make us more dependent on foreign input when we should be positioning ourselves to become the primary source of organic input in the agric sector,” she said.