Nigeria has taken its case for agricultural investment to London, calling on investors, financial institutions and development partners to help build a resilient food system and expand climate-smart farming. The Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, Senator Abubakar Kyari, made the appeal at the Nigeria-United Kingdom Investment Forum themed "Bridging the Gap: Financing Climate-Resilient Agriculture in Nigeria," according to TheCable.
The Financing Gap
Kyari said agriculture employs nearly 70 percent of the country's labour force and contributes over 24 percent to GDP, yet remains starved of capital, with total credit accessible to farmers reaching ₦3.4 trillion as of April 2025, less than 4 percent of the sector's contribution to the economy, as Vanguard reported. He warned that climate change is already manifesting through prolonged droughts, erratic rainfall, flooding and desertification, all undermining productivity and pushing up the urgency of a shift to climate-resilient systems.
What Nigeria Is Offering
The minister pointed to steps taken to reduce investor risk, including the distribution of solar-powered irrigation pumps for all-season farming, the promotion of climate-resilient seeds such as drought-tolerant sorghum and millet and flood-tolerant rice, and the National Agricultural Mechanization Programme, which has procured 2,000 tractors and over 9,000 farm implements, according to TheCable. He said institutions including the Bank of Agriculture, the National Agricultural Development Fund and the National Agricultural Insurance Corporation are being strengthened to de-risk investment and attract private capital. The Bank of Agriculture Managing Director, Ayo Sotinrin, who opened the forum alongside former UK Member of Parliament Mark Simmonds, said the scale of transformation needed in mechanisation, irrigation and post-harvest infrastructure is beyond any single institution, as The Guardian reported.
Whether foreign capital arrives at the scale sought will shape how quickly Nigeria can steady its food supply. FoodPrices Nigeria tracks verified retail prices across Lagos markets, the everyday measure of whether investment in resilient farming reaches the plate.