Nigeria is a country blessed with so many resources, with a population of over 200m, It is an economy in Africa that cannot be ignored. The agriculture industry is the largest employer of labour with more than 56% of the Nigerian population being full time farmers and so many others part time as it is the only occupation civil servants are allowed to indulge in asides from their full-time jobs as civil servants.
There has been a lot of investment done in the agriculture by the government, with every government coming up with policies and intervention to improve the productivity of the agriculture sector and fix the broken value chains. These broken value chain have led to a lot of losses with over 45% of what is produced on Nigerian farms lost to post harvest losses, avoidable losses. These losses translate to higher costs of food and had been putting a lot of pressure on the food system with potential risks of insecurity called, all this context before COVID. Why were the losses this high? The losses were because of numerous factors: lack of access to extension service to educate farmers of the best times to harvest, how to harvest and how to store, lack of access to machinery or agricultural tools, poor road network, lack of storage and processing facilities. The list could go on with multiple governments coming of with many policies to stem the losses in the sector without success. Despite the many challenges, we were still able to meet the food quota by importing the shortfall in the local demand from other countries.
The COVID pandemic came into the picture and food systems were disrupted globally. We observed countries enacting policies to stop the exportation of food to ensure her citizens had enough food to consume first before feeding other nations. Transportation of food across the country was disrupted with
