Transforming Nigeria S Agrifood System Wealthier But Also Healthier

Malnutrition, largely attributable to poor diets among both the rich and poor, presents a growing challenge in Nigeria. This brief considers the obstacles to food security and better nutrition, particularly the country’s macroeconomic instability, widespread poverty, and the need for greater investment and policy coherence to support dietary diversity. The authors describe how a policy shift to focus on consumer needs can transform the agrifood system to deliver healthier and more affordable diets for all Nigerians, as well as better and more secure rural livelihoods.

This paper uses comprehensive and long time series monthly food price data and a panel dyadic regression framework to evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated policy responses on spatial market integration across a diverse set of food items in Nigeria. The empirical results reveal several important insights. First, we show that a significant slowdown in the speed of adjustment and price transmission occurred during the pandemic. For some food items, the speed of adjustment and, by implication, spatial market integration weakened by two- to-threefold after the pandemic outbreak. The effect was specially pronounced for perishable food items. Second, lockdown measures and the spread of the pandemic triggered additional dispersion in market prices across markets. For example, lockdown measures were associated with a 5–10 percent reduction in the speed of readjustment toward long-term equilibrium. Third, additional underlying attributes of markets, including lack of access to digital infrastructure and distance between markets, exacerbated impacts associated with the pandemic. For instance, access to Internet service reduced the slowdown in the speed of adjustment caused by the pandemic, but longer distances between market pairs induced greater slowdown in the speed of price transmission. Our findings offer important insights for revitalizing the efficiency of food markets affected by the pandemic. The heterogenous impacts of the pandemic across value chains and markets reinforce the need to properly target post-pandemic recovery interventions and investments. Finally, we offer some insights to reduce the vulnerability of food and market systems to disruptions in future pandemics or similar phenomena that inhibit food marketing and trade.

This year marks 20 years of implementing the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), which was broadened under the 2014 Malabo Declaration on Accelerated Agricultural Growth and Transformation for Shared Prosperity and Improved Livelihoods. The 2023 Annual Trends and Outlook Report generates evidence on the implementation of the CAADP/Malabo agenda and thus contributes to the design of the post-Malabo phase of CAADP implementation. The report assesses the current state of Africa's food systems, explores strategic issues related to food systems transformation, and reflects on necessary methodologies and approaches to provide a better understanding of key challenges and necessary actions to accelerate transformation.

Forthcoming

Public support mechanisms for agriculture in many cases hinder the transformation towards healthier, more sustainable, equitable, and efficient food systems, thus actively steering us away from meeting the Sustainable Development Goals and targets of the Paris Agreement. This report sets out the compelling case for repurposing harmful agricultural producer support to reverse this situation, by optimizing the use of scarce public resources, strengthening economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, and ultimately driving a food systems transformation that can support global sustainable development commitments. The report provides policymakers with an updated estimate of past and current agricultural producer support for 88 countries, projected up until 2030. The trends emerging from the analysis are a clear call for action at country, regional and global levels to phase out the most distortive, environmentally and socially harmful support, such as price incentives and coupled subsidies, and redirecting it towards investments in public goods and services for agriculture, such as research and development and infrastructure, as well as decoupled fiscal subsidies. Overall, the analysis highlights that, while removing and/or reducing harmful agricultural support is necessary, repurposing initiatives that include measures to minimize policy trade-offs will be needed to ensure a beneficial outcome overall. The report confirms that, while a few countries have started repurposing and reforming agricultural support, broader, deeper, and faster reforms are needed for food systems transformation. Thus, it provides guidance (in six steps) on how governments can repurpose agricultural producer support – and the reforms this will take.

Nigeria is the largest producer of cowpea in the world and one of the highest consumers. This paper documents the challenges in cowpea production and consumption, export, and import trends in Nigeria. The critical and comparative review reveals several important insights. Cowpea is important for households and communities due to its substantial contributions to food security, nutrition, and revenue production. It plays a pivotal role in supporting various stakeholders involved in the value chain, including producers, processors, traders, and food vendors. Thus, cowpea is a crucial multipurpose crop. Although Nigeria is the largest producer of cowpea in the world, with a total production of 3.6 million tons in 2021, the demand for cowpea surpasses its supply due to factors such as the country's large population and low productivity. We describe the main challenges encountered in Nigeria's cowpea production, encompassing a range of issues such as high susceptibility to pests and diseases from planting to storage phases, low adoption of improved cowpea seed varieties, poor soil fertility, drought, and heat stress. The data suggest that low input use, low-yield varieties, and low productivity characterize the current level of cowpea production. Our findings suggest the need for tailored strategies to support the adoption of improved cowpea varieties in Nigeria to increase domestic production, adherence to quality standards, exploration of international markets for export opportunities, and ultimately, household income and improve nutritional outcomes.