20/01/2026
Dear President Bola Ahmed Tinubu,
Farmers are giving up.
Not in protest.
Not in anger.
In exhaustion.
They are not leaving the farms because they want to. They are leaving because staying has become a punishment.
Much has been said about insecurity, and it is true that many farming communities still face fear and uncertainty. But insecurity alone does not explain what we are witnessing across Nigeria today.
What is truly breaking farmers is policy.
Policies that allow foreign grains to flood our markets while Nigerian farmers are harvesting. Policies that claim to protect the poor but quietly destroy those who produce the food. Policies that reward importers and abandon producers.
When government decisions repeatedly make farming unprofitable, farmers listen. And they adjust. They stop planting.
I write not as an analyst, but as a farmer.
Last season, I went to the farm with hope and commitment. I bought fertilizer at over ₦60,000 per bag. I bought insecticides at more than ₦70,000 per carton. Every input cost far more than it should, but we endured because feeding the nation has never been cheap.
At harvest, our reward was loss.
A 75kg bag of paddy rice that cost me over ₦40,000 to produce was sold for about ₦25,000. That single season wiped out close to 50 percent of my capital.
This was not my experience alone.
Across farming communities, men and women who worked day and night lost money simply because the market was flooded with imported grains. Warehouses were full, prices crashed, and there was no buffer, no rescue, no protection.
This is not bad luck.
This is not climate.
This is policy failure.
Farmers are watching carefully. They hear announcements that ignore planting cycles. They see imported food arriving freely while their own produce rots or sells below cost. They are learning the hard way that their government does not have their back.
So they are stepping back.
When farmers stop farming, hunger does not start immediately. What starts is silence. Silent farms. Silent irrigation fields. Silent rural economies.
And from that silence comes hunger.
Mr President, food security is not built at the ports. It is built in the soil. It is built when farmers can afford inputs, when harvests are protected, and when hard work is not punished.
Why are farm inputs still so expensive?
Why are farmers left alone at harvest?
Why are mega companies supported with imported grains while Nigerian farmers are ruined?
Every bag of grain imported is a Nigerian job lost. Every season like the last one pushes more farmers out of agriculture and deeper into poverty.
Some are beginning to ask painful questions. Is the North being deliberately weakened? Are farming communities being sacrificed in the name of short-term price control? These questions may be uncomfortable, but they are being asked because people are hurting.
Mr President, a nation that abandons its farmers is walking toward hunger with its eyes open.
If this policy direction continues, more farmers will quietly walk away. Not because they hate Nigeria, but because they cannot continue to bleed.
And when that happens, no emergency importation will save us.
I am still standing.
Many around me are not.
This is a passionate call for the Federal Government to urgently review these dangerous policies—before empty farms become empty stomachs.
Respectfully,
Umar Aminu Imam
Nigerian Farmers
