The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations officially launched its Emergency and Resilience Plan for Nigeria for 2026 to 2028 in engagements across Abuja and Maiduguri in February 2026. The FAO described Nigeria as sitting at the epicentre of one of the world's most severe food emergencies, with 34.7 million people projected to face Crisis or worse levels of acute food insecurity by mid-2026, including more than 5.4 million acutely malnourished children. The three-year plan requires $347 million and is designed to support 12.6 million people.
The Scale of the Crisis
The Cadre Harmonisé food security assessment projected that 34.7 million people across 27 states and the FCT will be food insecure or worse between June and August 2026. The drivers identified include insurgency, banditry, herder-farmer conflict, climate shocks such as flooding and irregular rainfall, and the lingering effects of government food import policies that have weakened rural farm economies. The north-east and north-west remain the most acutely affected regions, but food insecurity has spread into north-central and parts of southern Nigeria as supply chain disruptions have pushed up retail prices.
What the Plan Covers
The FAO's Emergency and Resilience Plan is explicitly designed to move beyond humanitarian food assistance toward restoring productive capacity. The FAO's Senior Emergency and Rehabilitation Officer, Dunja Dujanovic, said the plan offers solutions aimed at addressing immediate needs while decreasing those needs over time. That means distributing seeds and fertilisers to farmers, supporting pastoralists with animal health services, and connecting agro-processors to markets, reflecting a broader UN strategic shift away from indefinite food aid dependence in the Nigerian context.
Why the Timing Matters
The plan launched as Nigeria entered a period of conflicting food price signals. Food inflation briefly fell to 8.89% in January 2026, its lowest level in 14 years, according to NBS data analysed by Nairametrics. However, it rebounded to 16.06% by April 2026, surpassing headline inflation for the first time in eight months. The rebound underscores what analysts and the FAO have argued: that Nigeria's food price pressures are structural, driven by production shortfalls, insecurity in farming belts, and inadequate storage infrastructure, rather than temporary disruptions that resolve on their own.
The Malnutrition Dimension
Beyond headline food insecurity figures, the FAO's plan addresses a child malnutrition emergency embedded within the broader crisis. More than 5.4 million children face acute malnutrition in the affected zones. Nigeria has separately adopted a National Policy on Food and Nutrition 2026 to 2035, approved at the National Council on Nutrition and awaiting Federal Executive Council ratification. Vice President Kashim Shettima, who chaired that meeting, said Nigeria would be judged not by its deliberations but by measurable outcomes across all 774 local government areas.
FoodPrices Nigeria tracks retail food prices across Lagos markets and will continue monitoring how production-level interventions in Nigeria's farming regions ultimately shape what consumers pay for staples in the city.