Climate change turns Nigerian farms into a hunger belt, violating human rights. REMMY NWEKE in this WeekendSalvo@NaijaAgroNet, argues the International Day of Poverty must begin by funding rural resilience and structural reform for smallholder farmers.
Introduction:
The smallholder farmer is the rural backbone of Nigeria, the primary producer of the food that feeds the nation. Yet, this critical population remains tragically vulnerable to external shocks, existing at the razor's edge of food security and poverty.
Confluence of climate and poverty:
The climate crisis is no longer a distant threat; it is an active and measurable force devastating Nigerian agriculture and livelihoods. The reality includes rising temperatures, severe shifting precipitation patterns, and a dangerous increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, which form a perfect storm battering the rural economy.
Specific Regional Impacts
The climate crisis manifests violently across Nigeria’s agro-ecological zones. For instance in the north and its advancing Sahara consequence, evolves that in the northern regions, the primary existential threat is desertification.
The yield of crisis:
These climatic shifts are directly translating into a major yield crisis. With higher temperatures and inconsistent rain, global staple crop yields are projected to decline significantly.
Fallout: Economic, nutritional, and social maltreatment:
The impact of this climate crisis extends far beyond the farm gate, touching every dimension of human dignity, the very core of the International Day's theme.
Economic instability and displacement:
When crop yields fail or entire harvests are washed away by floods, it translates immediately into decreased farmer income. This forces families into a severe poverty trap.
Hidden hunger:
Poverty is often defined by caloric deficiency, but climate change introduces a subtler, more insidious threat: nutritional maltreatment. Research cited by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) indicates that rising atmospheric CO2 levels can reduce the protein, iron, and zinc content in major cereals.
Traditional knowledge erosion:
For generations, African farmers have relied on inherited wisdom and deep knowledge of their local environment to predict rainfall patterns and determine optimal planting times. Climate change, with its erratic rainfall and prolonged droughts, renders this knowledge obsolete.
Structural vulnerability:
The final layer of maltreatment is structural: smallholder farmers, particularly women and the elderly, are disproportionately harmed. They have limited savings, poor access to formal credit, and low institutional capacity such as weak or absent insurance; to absorb shocks. When the rains fail, they are the first to suffer and the slowest to recover, reinforcing social inequality.
Overcoming institutional barriers to adaptation:
The inability of farmers to adapt is not due to a lack of effort but to systemic failures and institutional barriers:
Lack of financial capital:
The problem circles back to financial exclusion. Farmers cannot invest in necessary adaptive measures—such as small-scale irrigation systems, drought-tolerant crop varieties, or soil restoration techniques—without access to accessible and affordable credit. Traditional banks view them as too risky, leaving them with no financial tool to build resilience against climate variability.
Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) gap:
While Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) practices (like crop rotation, organic farming, and water harvesting) are known solutions, their adoption rate is low. This is primarily due to limited access to relevant training, extension services, and resilient inputs. Government support and NGO efforts often struggle to penetrate the deepest rural areas, creating a critical information and resource gap.
Policy and land tenure:
Weak land tenure security is a massive institutional disincentive. If farmers fear losing their land, they are highly unlikely to make long-term, climate-resilient investments, such as planting trees for windbreaks, building terraces, or investing in deep soil restoration. Addressing land rights is a fundamental institutional reform necessary for climate adaptation.
Supply chain maltreatment:
The struggle doesn't end at harvest. Poor post-harvest infrastructure (inadequate storage, poor transport links, lack of market access) amplifies losses, sometimes rendering a good harvest worthless. When farmers cannot efficiently move their goods to market or store them safely, the immense labor invested is not rewarded, which is yet another form of institutional maltreatment built into the food value chain.
Data and technology empowerment:
The emerging field of Agricultural Technology (AgriTech) must be deployed to empower farmers with knowledge. This means using mobile networks to provide real-time weather forecasts, digital soil testing results, and accurate market price information.
Financial de-risking:
Crucially, the financial risk must be de-risked. This involves the expansion of subsidized agricultural insurance programs that are easily accessible to smallholders and the creation of micro-credit facilities focused specifically on financing adaptation measures; for instance, loans for solar-powered boreholes or climate-resilient inputs. This financial safety net is non-negotiable for building resilience.
Collaborative institutional reform:
The final step is collaborative institutional reform. This means strengthening the capacity and reach of extension services, ensuring they are equipped to teach CSA techniques. It also demands that adaptation funds are prioritized as key national investments, moving from political rhetoric to measurable, tangible results that secure the futures of rural Nigerians.
Conclusion:
The International Day for the Eradication of Poverty reminds us that the fight for dignity is a fight against systemic injustice. In the Nigerian context, this fight is inextricably linked to the climate emergency acting as a human rights violation against the rural poor.
The core message is simple: Eradicating poverty must begin by recognizing and mitigating the climate vulnerability of the smallholder farmer. The challenge for both government and the private sector is to pivot investment towards making the smallholder farm robust and resilient.
By securing the land and the livelihood of our primary food producers, we can turn the tide on climate-driven poverty, giving millions the security, agency, and dignity they deserve for a sustainable future.
The smallholder farmer is the rural backbone of Nigeria, the primary producer of the food that feeds the nation. Yet, this critical population remains tragically vulnerable to external shocks, existing at the razor's edge of food security and poverty.
This inherent vulnerability brings into sharp relief the significance of the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty on October 17th.
The global theme for the 2025 observance, "Ending Social and Institutional Maltreatment: Acting together for just, peaceful and inclusive societies" demands that we examine how institutional neglect and exposure to environmental threats constitute a gross form of maltreatment against our food producers.
The global theme for the 2025 observance, "Ending Social and Institutional Maltreatment: Acting together for just, peaceful and inclusive societies" demands that we examine how institutional neglect and exposure to environmental threats constitute a gross form of maltreatment against our food producers.
In Nigeria, the challenge of poverty is fundamentally an agrarian problem now dangerously exacerbated by the climate emergency.
The thesis is unavoidable: true poverty eradication in Nigeria requires immediate, aggressive investment in climate-smart agricultural resilience and institutional support for smallholder farmers. Climate change acts as a risk multiplier, disproportionately affecting the nearly 95% of African farmers who rely on highly unpredictable rain-fed agriculture. Without comprehensive intervention, our pursuit of poverty eradication is futile, as climate shocks will consistently push millions back into destitution.
The thesis is unavoidable: true poverty eradication in Nigeria requires immediate, aggressive investment in climate-smart agricultural resilience and institutional support for smallholder farmers. Climate change acts as a risk multiplier, disproportionately affecting the nearly 95% of African farmers who rely on highly unpredictable rain-fed agriculture. Without comprehensive intervention, our pursuit of poverty eradication is futile, as climate shocks will consistently push millions back into destitution.
Confluence of climate and poverty:
The climate crisis is no longer a distant threat; it is an active and measurable force devastating Nigerian agriculture and livelihoods. The reality includes rising temperatures, severe shifting precipitation patterns, and a dangerous increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, which form a perfect storm battering the rural economy.
Specific Regional Impacts
The climate crisis manifests violently across Nigeria’s agro-ecological zones. For instance in the north and its advancing Sahara consequence, evolves that in the northern regions, the primary existential threat is desertification.
Experts estimate Nigeria loses up to 350,000 hectares of land annually to the advancing Sahara. This catastrophic loss of grazing land forces nomadic herders to migrate further south in search of water and pasture, fueling the tragic farmer-herder conflict. This conflict is a direct, climate-induced institutional and security crisis, destroying communities and crops, and deepening poverty.
Conversely, in the South, floods and erosion is the nemesis of farmers due to increasingly intense and erratic rainfall. Flooding wipes out staple crops like cassava and maize, leading to massive food loss and waste, and incurring huge financial losses for families who depend entirely on seasonal harvests.
Conversely, in the South, floods and erosion is the nemesis of farmers due to increasingly intense and erratic rainfall. Flooding wipes out staple crops like cassava and maize, leading to massive food loss and waste, and incurring huge financial losses for families who depend entirely on seasonal harvests.
The yield of crisis:
These climatic shifts are directly translating into a major yield crisis. With higher temperatures and inconsistent rain, global staple crop yields are projected to decline significantly.
For Nigeria, projections in the IPCC Assessment Reports (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) suggest that yields for staple crops like maize could fall by 20% or more in parts of West Africa under future warming scenarios.
Given that these crops form the backbone of both national food security and household income, this decline makes the entire food system, and the survival of millions of poor families, dangerously precarious.
Fallout: Economic, nutritional, and social maltreatment:
The impact of this climate crisis extends far beyond the farm gate, touching every dimension of human dignity, the very core of the International Day's theme.
Economic instability and displacement:
When crop yields fail or entire harvests are washed away by floods, it translates immediately into decreased farmer income. This forces families into a severe poverty trap.
They sell assets, pull children out of school, or incur crippling debt just to survive. This economic instability also triggers distress migration and displacement, creating internal refugee crises as people abandon ancestral lands that can no longer support them.
Hidden hunger:
Poverty is often defined by caloric deficiency, but climate change introduces a subtler, more insidious threat: nutritional maltreatment. Research cited by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) indicates that rising atmospheric CO2 levels can reduce the protein, iron, and zinc content in major cereals.
This creates "hidden hunger," where even a technically sufficient harvest may lack the micronutrients essential for the healthy development of children and the sustained energy of adults.
Traditional knowledge erosion:
For generations, African farmers have relied on inherited wisdom and deep knowledge of their local environment to predict rainfall patterns and determine optimal planting times. Climate change, with its erratic rainfall and prolonged droughts, renders this knowledge obsolete.
This leaves farmers vulnerable and stripped of their traditional expertise, denying them the adaptive knowledge and agency they need to adjust to the new ecological normal.
Structural vulnerability:
The final layer of maltreatment is structural: smallholder farmers, particularly women and the elderly, are disproportionately harmed. They have limited savings, poor access to formal credit, and low institutional capacity such as weak or absent insurance; to absorb shocks. When the rains fail, they are the first to suffer and the slowest to recover, reinforcing social inequality.
Overcoming institutional barriers to adaptation:
The inability of farmers to adapt is not due to a lack of effort but to systemic failures and institutional barriers:
Lack of financial capital:
The problem circles back to financial exclusion. Farmers cannot invest in necessary adaptive measures—such as small-scale irrigation systems, drought-tolerant crop varieties, or soil restoration techniques—without access to accessible and affordable credit. Traditional banks view them as too risky, leaving them with no financial tool to build resilience against climate variability.
Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) gap:
While Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) practices (like crop rotation, organic farming, and water harvesting) are known solutions, their adoption rate is low. This is primarily due to limited access to relevant training, extension services, and resilient inputs. Government support and NGO efforts often struggle to penetrate the deepest rural areas, creating a critical information and resource gap.
Policy and land tenure:
Weak land tenure security is a massive institutional disincentive. If farmers fear losing their land, they are highly unlikely to make long-term, climate-resilient investments, such as planting trees for windbreaks, building terraces, or investing in deep soil restoration. Addressing land rights is a fundamental institutional reform necessary for climate adaptation.
Supply chain maltreatment:
The struggle doesn't end at harvest. Poor post-harvest infrastructure (inadequate storage, poor transport links, lack of market access) amplifies losses, sometimes rendering a good harvest worthless. When farmers cannot efficiently move their goods to market or store them safely, the immense labor invested is not rewarded, which is yet another form of institutional maltreatment built into the food value chain.
Climate-Smart path to poverty eradication:
Eradicating poverty in the face of the climate crisis requires a pivot from reactive aid to proactive, resilient investment:
Scaling Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA)
We must urgently advocate for government and non-governmental support to scale proven CSA practices. This includes subsidized distribution of genetically improved, early-maturing, and drought-tolerant crop varieties. Furthermore, regional programs must promote water conservation techniques tailored to the specific agro-ecological zones of Nigeria, from irrigation technology in the dry North to drainage systems in the flood-prone South.
Eradicating poverty in the face of the climate crisis requires a pivot from reactive aid to proactive, resilient investment:
Scaling Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA)
We must urgently advocate for government and non-governmental support to scale proven CSA practices. This includes subsidized distribution of genetically improved, early-maturing, and drought-tolerant crop varieties. Furthermore, regional programs must promote water conservation techniques tailored to the specific agro-ecological zones of Nigeria, from irrigation technology in the dry North to drainage systems in the flood-prone South.
Data and technology empowerment:
The emerging field of Agricultural Technology (AgriTech) must be deployed to empower farmers with knowledge. This means using mobile networks to provide real-time weather forecasts, digital soil testing results, and accurate market price information.
This data allows farmers to optimize planting times, use inputs efficiently, and negotiate fair prices for their produce, turning uncertainty into actionable knowledge.
Financial de-risking:
Crucially, the financial risk must be de-risked. This involves the expansion of subsidized agricultural insurance programs that are easily accessible to smallholders and the creation of micro-credit facilities focused specifically on financing adaptation measures; for instance, loans for solar-powered boreholes or climate-resilient inputs. This financial safety net is non-negotiable for building resilience.
Collaborative institutional reform:
The final step is collaborative institutional reform. This means strengthening the capacity and reach of extension services, ensuring they are equipped to teach CSA techniques. It also demands that adaptation funds are prioritized as key national investments, moving from political rhetoric to measurable, tangible results that secure the futures of rural Nigerians.
Conclusion:
The International Day for the Eradication of Poverty reminds us that the fight for dignity is a fight against systemic injustice. In the Nigerian context, this fight is inextricably linked to the climate emergency acting as a human rights violation against the rural poor.
The core message is simple: Eradicating poverty must begin by recognizing and mitigating the climate vulnerability of the smallholder farmer. The challenge for both government and the private sector is to pivot investment towards making the smallholder farm robust and resilient.
By securing the land and the livelihood of our primary food producers, we can turn the tide on climate-driven poverty, giving millions the security, agency, and dignity they deserve for a sustainable future.
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