Tinubu’s food import policy: Balancing immediate relief with long-term agricultural revival
The Daily Trust editorial of 6 October 2025, titled “Tinubu’s Food Import Policy Is Strangulating Northern Agriculture,” expresses understandable concern about the welfare of farmers across Northern Nigeria. The editorial rightly notes the severe pressures facing local producers—rising input costs, climatic shocks, insecurity, and the competition from imported staples. These are genuine challenges, and the […]
The Daily Trust editorial of 6 October 2025, titled “Tinubu’s Food Import Policy Is Strangulating Northern Agriculture,” expresses understandable concern about the welfare of farmers across Northern Nigeria. The editorial rightly notes the severe pressures facing local producers—rising input costs, climatic shocks, insecurity, and the competition from imported staples. These are genuine challenges, and the federal government fully acknowledges them.
However, the conclusion that the current import relief policy is “strangulating” northern agriculture is neither supported by evidence nor reflective of the broader national strategy guiding the administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. The truth is more nuanced, rooted in a difficult trade-off between short-term survival and long-term recovery.
A policy born of necessity, not neglect
By mid-2025, Nigeria faced an acute food emergency. Food inflation surged above 40 per cent, real wages and purchasing power fell steeply, and the cost of basic staples in major cities became unbearable for millions of families. At the same time, flooding in the North East, drought pockets in the North West, and insecurity in parts of the Middle Belt sharply reduced local production.
Against this backdrop, the President approved the temporary suspension of import duties, tariffs, and taxes on key staples—rice, maize, wheat, sorghum, and millet. This was not a shift in Nigeria’s agricultural policy but a fiscal shock absorber designed to prevent hunger, stabilize prices, and restore public confidence.
Without this intervention, the Treasury would have been compelled to resort to direct price subsidies or emergency grain imports funded off-budget, both of which would have worsened inflation and deepened the fiscal deficit. The import window thus became a more efficient and targeted way of cushioning households without undermining macroeconomic stability.
Rebuilding agriculture while stabilising prices
The decision to grant temporary import relief was accompanied by a suite of production recovery measures already under implementation:
- Agricultural Input Support Window (AISW): N150 billion has been deployed through a joint Budget Office–CBN framework to lower fertiliser and agro-chemical costs by 22 per cent and support cooperatives with bulk purchase transport subsidies.
- Expansion of Irrigated Land: The Ministry of Water Resources has commenced work to expand irrigation capacity by 400,000 hectares across Hadejia, Bakolori, and Dadin Kowa. These projects are being fast-tracked to boost dry-season farming in 2026.
- Strategic Grain Reserve and Price Stabilisation: The Strategic Grain Reserve is being replenished to 750,000 tonnes to allow for targeted market releases during lean seasons, thereby stabilising prices without distorting farmgate incentives.
- Agricultural Credit and Risk Sharing: The recapitalised Agricultural Credit Guarantee Scheme Fund (ACGSF) now provides single-digit financing to smallholder farmers, with federal guarantees against losses due to insecurity or flooding.
- Tariff Reintroduction Roadmap: The suspension of tariffs remains strictly time-bound and will expire in December 2025, with a phased reinstatement of moderate tariffs from Q1 2026, once domestic supply conditions improve.
These measures demonstrate that the administration’s food security strategy is not built on imports but on transitioning from temporary relief to self-reliance.
Correcting a common misconception
The Daily Trust editorial assumes that the temporary import window automatically disadvantages northern farmers. This assumption ignores the fact that the same macroeconomic shocks—exchange-rate realignment, high energy costs, and logistics disruptions—were already undermining profitability before the duty suspension.
In fact, the import policy indirectly benefits local producers by moderating price spikes, curbing hoarding, and ensuring affordable access to inputs and consumer goods, which help maintain demand stability. Once food price volatility is tamed, farmers can plan production and investment with greater certainty.
It is also important to emphasise that Nigeria’s food system is interlinked across regions. Stable urban demand supports rural markets, while lower consumer prices in the short term prevent civil unrest and protect the purchasing power of millions of low-income households — including farmers themselves.
The fiscal logic and national interest
From the fiscal standpoint, the import relief has averted an even larger social and financial crisis. The Treasury has maintained discipline by avoiding new subsidy arrears, while keeping the budget deficit within sustainable limits. The alternative—massive off-budget interventions—would have reversed the hard-won progress in fiscal consolidation.
The measure also provides a breathing space for domestic agricultural restructuring: recapitalising credit institutions, revamping irrigation networks, and modernising logistics corridors that connect farms to markets. In other words, the temporary import policy is not the end of agricultural reform; it is the bridge to it.
Path forward: Empowering farmers and protecting consumers
As conditions improve, the federal government will restore protective tariffs and expand domestic value chains in agro-processing, storage, and transportation. The Budget Office is working with the federal ministries of agriculture and finance, the CBN, and the National Economic Council Secretariat to ensure that 2026 capital releases for rural roads, fertiliser blending plants, and silo infrastructure are prioritised for northern states.
The goal is to ensure that Nigerian farmers, particularly in the North, can compete profitably and sustainably, not through protectionism alone but through productivity, credit, and infrastructure.
President Tinubu’s food import policy is best understood as a crisis-response mechanism—not a market distortion. It is a pragmatic act of leadership that balances compassion for the hungry with responsibility to the fiscus.
By December 2025, as domestic production stabilises and inflation moderates, Nigeria will begin to transition fully to its home-grown food sufficiency model. The Budget Office of the Federation reaffirms the federal government’s unwavering commitment to northern agriculture as the foundation of national food security and regional prosperity.
Temporary relief today must not be mistaken for policy reversal. It is, in fact, the pathway to recovery—and to the long-term resurgence of Nigerian agriculture.
Dr Yakubu is the Director General, Budget Office of the Federation, Abuja