By Lanre Shodimu
Farmers in Nigeria have said that the destruction of farmers’ capital across the country is driven by overlapping failures in market coordination, insecurity, price distortions, and repeated agro-season disruptions.
According to a statement by an advocacy group, the Foundation for Peace Professionals (PeacePro), signed by its executive director, Abdulrazaq Hamzat, the farmers said that their losses were also caused by the consequences of poorly interpreted, poorly communicated, or poorly localised forecasts.
The group alleged that Nigerian farmers suffered an estimated loss of nearly N5 trillion in productive capital over the past two years due to climate-related factors, among others.
Hamzat said that, NiMet’s claim that its forecasts were “rated above 90%” by stakeholders does not automatically translate into effective real-world outcomes for millions of farmers.
“In agriculture, the true measure of forecast utility is not internal rating summaries or global benchmarks. The real test is whether farmers were able to plant correctly, avoid preventable losses, achieve expected yields, secure market stability, and preserve capital for the next production cycle,” he said.
PeacePro emphasized that Nigeria experienced the opposite in 2024–2025, including distress harvesting, price crashes, forced sell-offs, rising post-harvest losses, and growing farmer exit pressures.
Our report clearly stated that the losses resulted from a combination of policy-induced price distortions, weak market stabilisation, insecurity and disrupted farming corridors, post harvest failures, excessive import pressure, and poor forecast reliability at the farmer level,” he stated.
However, PeacePro noted that NiMet’s forecasts remain a critical national input, and where farmers repeatedly report that weather guidance was misleading, mistimed, or not localised enough for real planting decisions, such complaints deserve serious institutional attention, not dismissal.
According to Hamzat, the group has documented farmer complaints from multiple states across Nigeria’s six geo-political zones, particularly among small and medium-scale commercial producers who supply Nigeria’s urban markets.
These complaints include delayed rainfall onset patterns not matching advisories, unexpected dry spells during critical planting windows, flooding events that exceeded warnings, poor dissemination to grassroots farmers, and limited extension translation of NiMet outputs into actionable decisions.
The group said that, “when farmers suffer repeated cycle losses, the result is capital destruction, and this cannot be erased by generalised claims of performance ratings.
It stated that its report was designed to warn Nigeria against a dangerous trend, treating farmers as shock absorbers for inflation and food politics.
“A government cannot claim success because prices temporarily decline if that decline is produced by producer losses, forced sell-offs, collapsing rural reinvestment, and structural weakening of production capacity. Hamzat said.
To resolve the issue responsibly, PeacePro called for an independent national review of the 2024–2025 agro-season involving independent private farmers, smallholder farmers, farmer associations, commodity unions, independent researchers, private sector aggregators, state ADPs, and non-governmental observers.
Such a review, PeacePro said, should focus on actual farmer outcomes, localised forecast effectiveness, yield realities, post harvest losses, market distortions, and capital retention across production cycles.
