Unsafe food in Nigeria is often framed as a public health concern. In reality, it is also a strategic economic challenge. For a country pushing aggressively to expand non-oil exports, weak food safety systems threaten to erase hard-won gains in trade competitiveness and investor confidence, a risk that practitioners working across agricultural value chains are increasingly confronting firsthand.
With nearly a decade of experience strengthening farmer incomes and supply-chain performance across Nigeria and, more recently, across Africa and Asia with Olam Agri, Ayomide Ogundeji has seen how gaps in traceability and compliance quietly erode market access.
His work sits at the intersection of sustainability, market development, and agricultural transformation, a vantage point that underscores why food safety must now be treated as core economic policy.
Export losses hiding in plain sight
At Nigeria’s borders, the costs are already visible. Export rejections in the United States and the European Union are frequently linked to preventable issues: poor documentation, contamination, pesticide residues, aflatoxins, and weak traceability systems.
These are not unsolvable problems. When exporters and regulators can credibly prove product origin and handling through reliable data, many of these barriers disappear. The real gap is not capability, it is verification.
A new regulatory landscape
Global compliance requirements are tightening. The EU Deforestation Regulation now requires proof that commodities such as cocoa, coffee, rubber, palm oil, soy, and timber were not produced on land deforested after 31 December 2020. Shipments must be fully traceable to mapped farm locations.
As Nigeria’s exports to Europe rise, so does the risk of exclusion wherever the data trail breaks, a pattern that industry practitioners like Ogundeji have observed repeatedly in efforts to connect smallholders to premium markets.
If a shipment cannot be traced, it cannot be trusted, and it will not be traded.
Traceability as economic infrastructure
Traceability should no longer be treated as a technical add-on. It is economic infrastructure. When supply chains can follow product movement lot by lot:
- Regulators can target inspections more efficiently
- Buyers can verify sustainability and safety claims
- Recalls become faster and less costly
Without traceability, risk is mispriced and compliant producers are undercut by weaker actors. The result is a market that rewards opacity instead of quality, precisely the inefficiency that current livelihood and value-chain programs are trying to correct.
A Nigerian solution
Nigeria is not starting from zero. Homegrown innovations are emerging. Agrolinking’s AgTrail platform consolidates farm GPS mapping, digital farmer identities, certificates of origin, phytosanitary documents, and laboratory results into a verifiable digital passport for each shipment.
Solutions of this kind reflect the data-driven approach championed by practitioners working to improve supply-chain performance and unlock new market opportunities for smallholders.
By turning fragmented records into trusted evidence, such systems can:
- reduce clearance delays
- lower rejection risk
- strengthen buyer confidence and price premiums
Data is the new phytosanitary certificate. Traceability turns evidence into market access.
Why unsafe food is also a nutrition problem
Food safety failures ripple beyond exports. When households distrust perishables, they shift spending toward shelf-stable foods perceived as safer, often sacrificing nutrient quality.
School feeding and maternal nutrition programs also become more expensive and less effective when upstream food safety is uncertain. From a livelihoods perspective, this creates a double burden: weaker market outcomes for farmers and poorer nutrition outcomes for consumers.
What Nigeria should do now
Nigeria’s next moves must be deliberate and strategic. Food safety should be elevated to the level of economic policy, not left solely within the health domain. Domestic standards need tighter alignment with international requirements. The country must invest in a national traceability and recall backbone that interoperates with credible private platforms.
Equally important, smallholder farmers must not be left behind. Co-funding farmer digitization will prevent compliance from becoming a new exclusion barrier, a priority consistent with ongoing livelihood programs aimed at building resilient, competitive value chains.
The global race for premium agricultural markets is no longer just about volume. It is about proof, proof of safety, legality, and origin.
Countries that can demonstrate these at scale will stabilize farmer incomes, attract better buyers, and build resilient export growth. For Nigeria, investing in traceability is no longer a technical upgrade. It is a national competitiveness strategy for 2026 and beyond, a conclusion strongly reinforced by field experience across diverse production landscapes.
