Oluyemi Oloyede
On 16 October, Nigeria marks World Food Day against an uncomfortable backdrop of numbers. The latest Cadre Harmonisé analysis, conducted by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security with the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Food Programme, projects that 34.7 million Nigerians will face acute food insecurity between June and August 2026, up from 27.2 million today.
Nigeria ranks 115th out of 123 countries on this year’s Global Hunger Index, a “serious” hunger rating. These are not the numbers of a country short of land, labour, or ambition. We have never lacked agricultural potential. From fertile farmlands and diverse agro-ecological zones to extensive livestock belts and vibrant fisheries, our natural endowment and human capital are capable of sustaining a thriving nation.
Despite this abundance, millions of Nigerians face severe challenges in accessing sufficient, nutritious, and affordable food.
As the global community calls on us to innovate today so we can nourish tomorrow, this contradiction must compel us to look past raw harvest projections and confront a more fundamental operational reality: can we build an integrated food system that reliably gets what we produce from the farm gate to the family table?
From where I sit on the factory floor as a manufacturer, food security does not begin or end with farming. It depends entirely on the resilience and efficiency of the broader industrial value chain.
A farmer needs certified and proven inputs, practical financing, modern technology, and predictable offtake and pricing. A food manufacturer needs a steady supply of high-grade raw materials at the scale, consistency, and pricing required to keep production lines running.
Consumers, at the end of the line, require safe, nutrient-dense products that do not break household budgets. Along these points lie critical operational dependencies: post-harvest aggregation, cold storage, industrial processing, primary transportation, stable energy, and cold-chain distribution. Every link matters; when one fails, the entire system fractures.
Consider the untapped opportunities and avoidable losses in our fruit-producing corridors. Nigeria cultivates an extraordinary variety of fruits, yet we lose an estimated 35 to 40 million tonnes of food annually, worth more than 3.5 trillion, much of it before it ever reaches consumers.
Perishables such as fruits and vegetables carry the highest loss rates, often 40 to 50%, driven by the absence of cold-chain logistics, rural storage, and rapid processing infrastructure. Fruits are inherently perishable.
Without efficient rural aggregation centres and temperature-controlled transport, harvest gluts quickly turn into catastrophic post-harvest waste. Nigeria’s own agribusiness sector already shows what is achievable: in Kaduna State, Tomato Jos has built an outgrower and processing model around roughly 500 smallholder tomato farmers, and a fresh $2.5 million investment from the EU’s agriculture financing facility this September will help it scale to 1,500 farmers, nearly quadruple fresh-tomato throughput by 2029, and lift farmer incomes by more than 150% over the same period.
This is not a hypothetical fix; we are building it today in Northern Nigeria, and we need to replicate this or similar models across local government areas and states in Nigeria for multiple crops, starting with the most impacted.
Building an industrialised fruit- and vegetable-processing ecosystem changes this equation entirely: it stabilises farmers’ incomes, cushions seasonal market shocks, and converts perishable harvests into shelf-stable, value-added products that nourish consumers all year round.
The same operational dynamic governs our livestock and dairy ecosystem. Nigeria possesses one of the largest livestock herds in sub-Saharan Africa, yet increasing our self-sufficiency in dairy and protein cannot be achieved simply by having more cattle on open grazing routes. It demands a synchronised, commercial infrastructure: certified feed and fodder supplies, systematic veterinary care, sanitary milking stations, rural milk collection centres, and uninterrupted cold-chain logistics running directly from pastoral communities to processing plants.
Globally, India’s Amul, a farmer-owned cooperative founded in 1946, offers the template: it organised millions of fragmented smallholders into village-level collection and cold storage facilities, centres feeding central processing plants, and that network today represents 3.6 million farmers and turns over more than US$12 billion a year, making it the world’s largest dairy cooperative.
Morocco’s COPAG, a cooperative founded in Taroudant in 1987 and owned and run by its farmer-members, shows how far this model can go: it became a self-sufficient FMCG business that processes and sells what its members grow, led by the Jaouda dairy brand, and reported about 8.1 billion dirhams in revenue in 2025, close to US$900 million.
Nigeria does not need to invent this model; it needs the commercial will to build it at this scale domestically. Without these physical and logistical links, the gap between domestic livestock rearing and affordable, locally packaged dairy products remains unnecessarily wide.
This is why agriculture and manufacturing can no longer operate in administrative or commercial silos; They are industrial partners. Food manufacturers provide predictable, high-volume off-take for agricultural producers; in turn, disciplined agricultural supply chains provide the raw materials needed to expand local industrial capacity and substitute costly imports.
When this relationship matures, economic value is created at every node, farmers gain steady livelihoods, industrial processing creates skilled employment, transport operators run viable routes, Nigerian families gain access to wholesome food, and governments get taxes to provide social goods.
However, local sourcing cannot remain a corporate slogan or an aspirational target; it must make cold commercial sense for everyone involved. For a manufacturer, domestic raw materials must meet strict operational standards of volume, safety, hygiene, and cost efficiency. For smallholder farmers and commercial growers, meeting those standards requires multi-year supply contracts, technical extension support, dedicated agricultural financing, and rural feeder roads.
Bridging this operational divide requires coordinated, long-term partnerships connecting manufacturers, commercial banks, development institutions, agricultural research bodies, and farming clusters.
Through all of this, accessibility must remain the defining benchmark of success. Food security cannot simply mean that food is physically present in the market; it must mean that nutritious food is realistically affordable to ordinary working households.
Food inflation has run near, and at times above, 20% for most of 2026, easing only slightly to 19.57% in August. Production tariffs, volatile energy costs, haulage bottlenecks, finance charges, and packaging inputs all accumulate directly onto the final retail price.
Solving the affordability puzzle therefore requires addressing systemic operational friction along the line, rather than relying on short-term food distribution interventions.
As a Nigerian food and beverage company, C.H.I. Limited operates at the heart of this interconnected landscape. Our daily operations across foundational categories, from fruit beverages to dairy, consistently show that the future of Nigeria’s food security is not decided solely by what happens within the walls of our factories. It is shaped by what happens upstream long before raw materials reach our factory gates, and downstream after packaged products leave our loading docks.
On this World Food Day, it is time to move past the rhetoric of potential. Progress cannot be measured merely by total hectares cleared or nominal tonnes harvested.
The true measure of food sovereignty lies in how much of that harvest is processed domestically, how much waste is engineered out of the value chain, how efficiently products move to consumer plates, how much of the remaining is exported, and how many viable livelihoods are built in the process.
Nigeria has the land, the farmers, the livestock, and a vast consumer base.
We have the industrial capacity to process what we grow. The urgent task is connecting these components into an efficient, resilient supply network. A nation cannot eat potential. We must do the practical work of turning potential into production, production into real value, and that value into food that reliably nourishes our people.
*Oluyemi is the Executive Director, Operations of Chivita Hollandia International (C.H.I. Limited). He is a seasoned business and people leader with extensive experience in driving sustainable growth, operational excellence, and high-performing, cross-functional teams. Prior to joining C.H.I. Limited, he served as Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of UAC Foods Limited and held senior leadership positions at Kerry Taste & Nutrition, Kellogg and Procter & Gamble, where he delivered strong operational and commercial results. He is recognised for his collaborative leadership style, growth mindset, resilience, diligence and commitment to excellence and integrity.