No country can feed itself when its farmers are hunted from their fields. Across northern Nigeria, terrorists and bandits now dictate who plants, who harvests and, in too many cases, who lives.

Field investigations in Sokoto, Zamfara, Katsina, Plateau, Benue, Niger and Borno reveal a grim pattern. Villages once sustained by rain-fed agriculture now stand half-abandoned. Those who dare to farm pay “security levies” to armed groups, sometimes running into millions of naira. Refusal can mean arson, abduction or execution.

This is not informal taxation. It is economic warfare, and its impact is measurable. World Bank data show crop losses in Nigeria rising from about 6 per cent of cultivated plots in 2018/19 to more than 20 per cent in 2023/24. Even where seeds go into the ground, farmers increasingly cannot harvest safely, eroding both household income and national supply.

Borno, once a promising wheat hub, illustrates the devastation. An agricultural study estimated that insurgency has effectively wiped out the state’s 420,000-tonne wheat production capacity. Behind that statistic lie massacres that have seared themselves into rural memory: dozens of farmers and fishermen killed at Dumba, scores of rice farmers slaughtered near Zabarmari while bent over their fields. After such scenes, many survivors simply refuse to return to the land.

The result is a vicious cycle. Insecurity shrinks cultivated area and output, food becomes scarcer, prices soar and more Nigerians slip into hunger. The country then turns outward, spending trillions of naira on food and beverage imports despite possessing about 37 million hectares of arable land and a vast, youthful labour force.

Experts have long warned that insecurity is doubling the ranks of the food-insecure. Yet agriculture still contributes a dominant share of Nigeria’s output, suggesting how much more could be achieved if farmers were simply protected.

Breaking this cycle demands a security-first approach to food policy. The federal government must reclaim rural communities, secure planting and harvest seasons, and protect roads, storage facilities and markets. At the same time, relatively safer southern states must scale up production of staples and livestock so the entire nation is not hostage to violence in one region.

Nigeria has the land, people and climate to feed itself. What it lacks is the basic guarantee that a farmer can plant, harvest and transport food without paying tribute to gunmen or risking death. Until that changes, food security will remain an empty slogan.