‘Farmers lost N5trillion to poor weather forecasts’

The Foundation for Peace Professionals (PeacePro) hinted that Nigerian farmers lost about N5 trillion productive capital between 2024 and 2025 to poor and misleading weather forecasts by the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet) as well as policy-induced crashes.

It declared that Nigeria’s agriculture sector is in a deep structural crisis.

In a statement, the group’s Executive Director, Abdulrazaq Hamzat described the losses as direct agricultural capital destruction at the producer level, stressing that the estimate does not include secondary economic effects such as consumer inflation, GDP contraction, foreign exchange pressure, or security related costs.

 “Those impacts come later. What has already happened is the liquidation of farmer capital,” PeacePro said.

He added that Nigeria did not successfully “control food prices between 202 and 2025. Instead, a combination of poorly timed policy interventions, price suppression mechanisms, weak market coordination, and unreliable weather forecasting by NiMet forced farmers to sell produce below cost, wiping out the capital required to sustain future production cycles.”

 “This was not a market correction. It was a policy shock that transferred value away from producers.

The statement said that while Nigeria has an estimated of between 38 and 40 million people engaged in agriculture, clarifying that the most severe damage was concentrated among market facing producers, not subsistence farmers.

It added that “although subsistence farmers were also adversely affected, particularly by poor and misleading weather forecasts issued by NiMet.

“The most affected group includes 6–8 million producers, small and medium scale commercial farmers, storage poor price taking producers, farmers engaged in grains, tubers, vegetables, and legumes.

The group maintained that the scale of destruction is comparable to a financial sector collapse, with one critical difference.

 “This crisis did not happen in banks or stock markets.

It happened quietly, in farms and rural communities, cautioning that depleted farmer capital will inevitably lead to reduced planting in 2026, lower domestic food supply, higher future food prices, increased rural poverty and social instability, the statement added.

PeacePro therefore urged Nigerian authorities to publicly acknowledge the scale of agricultural capital destruction and immediately shift policy away from short term price suppression toward producer protection, capital preservation, and market stability.

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