By Ziv Gadya, CEO, TSI-Africa
The most important thing we have built in Delta State is not a greenhouse or a poultry house. It is a road. Drive along it and you pass power poles and solar lights, open fields, then greenhouse frames taking shape alongside a poultry house, with crews in hi-vis working on the steel. A sign by the poultry house reads “No PPE, no entry”. Until the road was built, this land was hard to reach. Nobody builds a road for just one greenhouse. You build it for what follows: an agricultural ecosystem. An agrifarm is the best anchor tenant a state or country can have, because it needs a road, power, cold rooms, a packhouse, a laboratory, a machinery workshop and a route to a port, and each of those also serves the town around it and its community. That is the infrastructure food buyers need. With its vast arable land, Nigeria has the potential to become a dependable supplier, feeding its own population, a continent whose food demand is rising rapidly, and customers around the world who can no longer take their supply for granted.
Few customers need that more than the Gulf. It imports up to 85 percent of its food (S&P Global), and more than 70 percent of it normally passes through the Strait of Hormuz (TRT World). In Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain, between 80 and 100 percent of the wheat consumed has travelled through that single channel (French Ministry of Agriculture and Food Sovereignty). Since the war in the Middle East began on 28 February, the strait has faced repeated disruptions, and there is still no end in sight. After the 2008 food crisis, Gulf governments spent heavily on farmland abroad; that was the right strategic decision then. The lesson of 2026 is that land without a way to move what grows on it protects nobody. Europe is learning a version of the same lesson: when gas prices rose more than 20 percent, its fertilizer producers cut output (BusinessDay). Production matters, but resilience depends on the systems that connect it to market.
That is where Nigeria falls short today. Its constraint is not land or production potential, but the systems that give buyers confidence in the product. Nigeria is the world’s largest producer of cowpeas and among the top five for sesame, yet both are still turned back at foreign borders for failing safety standards (Shipping Position). As recently as a decade ago, the European Union suspended Nigerian bean imports for the same reason (Daily Trust), and the fact that a three-year WTO programme is needed to fix sesame and cowpea certification shows where the bottleneck sits (International Trade Centre). A buyer signing a multi-year contract wants to know three things: that the crop will arrive, that it will pass inspection, and that someone can identify where it was grown. A rejected container is therefore a laboratory problem, a cold-chain problem and a traceability problem. Those are infrastructure failures that neither aid nor individual farmers can fix, which is why investment has to start with roads, cold rooms and laboratories, not just land.
An obvious objection follows: why export food from a country where nearly 35 million people face hunger in the lean season? Nigeria’s hunger is real, and aid should fund relief. But aid addresses immediate need. Investment answers a different question: will a buyer in Riyadh or Rotterdam sign a contract for the supply? If one does, the road, the cold room and the laboratory get built, and Nigerians benefit from their domestic production, too. Longer term, Africa’s food security will depend on countries that produce at scale and move food reliably across borders, and Nigeria has the potential to be one of them. Exporting agricultural products from a country with many hungry people may seem counterintuitive, but this is not a weaker case for investment. It is a more bankable one.
Making that case work depends on how the contracts are written. Buyers who want a secure supply should refuse export-only contracts, insist on local offtake, and bring smallholders into the supply chain. Structured that way, the choice is not between exports and food security: the infrastructure that makes Nigeria a reliable supplier is the same infrastructure that helps feed Nigerians and strengthens food resilience across Africa.
Governments and importers in the Gulf and Europe who view food as a matter of national security should go further. They should co-finance the unglamorous assets – roads, cold rooms, laboratories and packhouses – and sign long-term offtake contracts that give lenders something to lend against. The Gulf has the capital and, since 2008, the habit of investing in farmland abroad. What it lacks is the road to that land, and in Nigeria that road can be built now. Building it would secure supplies for overseas buyers, strengthen food security at home, and position Nigeria as a dependable supplier to Africa and beyond. A deed to farmland is a piece of paper. A road to it is an asset.
*As head of business development, Mr. Gadya shapes TSI’s strategy with a focus on new markets, strategic partnerships, and client relations. His role drives the company’s expansion and ensures the delivery of tailored agricultural solutions aligned with the needs of governments, investors, and local communities.