Agriculture minister says Nigeria loses $10 billion of farm produce a year as 14 of 17 federal silos fail to function

Nigeria throws away a tenth of what it produces before that food ever reaches a market. Agriculture and Food Security Minister Abubakar Kyari told delegates at the Nigerian Economic Summit in Abuja that post-harvest losses strip about $10 billion worth of produce from the economy every year, a figure that converts the country's food insecurity from a conversation about farming shortfalls into one about the systems that fail between the farm gate and the consumer.

The scale of the spoilage

The breakdown the Minister presented showed losses concentrated where storage is weakest. Grains and cereals suffer losses in the range of 15 to 20 per cent when they are kept in traditional storage structures, the earthen silos and polythene-lined cribs through which most of the country's smallholder output still passes. Fruit and vegetables lose far more, between 60 and 70 per cent, quantities that are destroyed or degraded before they can be sold in the perishables market that has grown fastest in urban centres.

The infrastructure deficit behind those numbers is stark. Only three of the federal government's 17 grain silos are currently operational, according to the Minister, a failure rate that has left the state's own storage backbone, designed to hold strategic grain reserves and stabilise prices between harvests, largely out of commission. A strategic reserve that does not store is a policy instrument that has faded, and its absence pushes both the burden and the risk onto the private sector, most of which operates below the capacity it needs.

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Why the losses persist

Post-harvest loss in Nigeria is not a single problem but a chain of them. Roads that flood in the wet season strand produce at the point of harvest, when volumes peak and prices collapse. Cold-chain infrastructure barely exists outside the largest cities, so anything perishable is either consumed locally at minimum prices or spoiled. Aggregation is informal, dominated by the thousands of small traders who move produce on the back of motorcycles rather than through bulk-handling systems. And storage technology itself, from hermetic bags to temperature-controlled warehouses, has not scaled because the financing costs of capital-intensive storage are prohibitive for most smallholders and their cooperatives.

The arithmetic is punishing. A 60 to 70 per cent loss rate on fruit and vegetables means that for every ten kilograms harvested, six or more never reach a paying customer. On a national scale, with production in the hundreds of millions of tonnes across all crops, the $10 billion annual loss the Minister cited is a conservative count of value that was grown, tended and harvested, then vanished into spoilage. In an economy where food inflation, at 19.59 per cent in September, remains the single biggest pressure on household budgets, the loss is not just a commercial inefficiency but the direct cost of the mismatch between what Nigeria grows and what it can reliably deliver.

What can be built

The policy response now converging around the summit conversation imagines storage as infrastructure, rated and financed like roads and power. Modernising and recommissioning the failing federal silos would give the state a functional strategic reserve for the first time in years, a tool for price stabilisation that works with market mechanisms rather than through ad-hoc import licences. Private cold-chain investment, scaled up under blended finance structures that mix concessional capital with commercial tranches, has the potential to cut fruit and vegetable losses at the same time it creates jobs in logistics and processing. Hermetic storage bags and small modular silos for grains, technologies that are cheap and proven, can be pushed through the farmer-support programmes that the Ministry already operates, converting a 15 to 20 per cent grain loss into single digits within a few seasons.

The prize for getting any of this right is large. Value recovered from post-harvest losses is cheaper than value grown: farmers' existing output becomes more valuable at zero extra production cost, consumers face softer price seasonality, and export chains benefit from commodities that arrive in good condition. Private capital has already shown an appetite for the value chain; the market's oversubscription this quarter of agricultural commercial paper for procurement purposes shows there is funding available for firms that can present the opportunity in investable form.

The Minister's diagnosis lands at a moment when food security has become Nigeria's sharpest economic question. Falling oil-revenue dependence, reserves at an 18-year high and a stabilising currency have restored the fiscal room to invest. Recovering even a third of the $10 billion annual loss would turn what is now waste into income, and it is one of the highest-return infrastructure programmes available to the government, and it requires not new seeds or machines so much as systems that work.