As rivers dry up and groundwater becomes harder to access, Nigerian farmers are facing unprecedented challenges to keep their crops alive—threatening food security in Africa’s most populous nation. The worsening crisis is being widely attributed to climate change, with conservationists and environmental experts sounding the alarm over an urgent need for intervention. In Kwalkwalawa, a rural community in Nigeria’s northwestern Sokoto State, farmer Nasiru Bello surveys his parched five-hectare farm where only a muddy puddle remains of a river that once sustained his crops. “All these things are a result of climate change,” he says, explaining how he now depends on expensive, unreliable wells. “You dig one, and it dries up. Then you must dig another.”
Like many in Nigeria’s semi-arid northwest, Bello is among more than 80% of Nigerian farmers who are smallholder producers—working land with few resources and limited access to irrigation infrastructure. These farmers collectively produce 90% of the country’s agricultural output, yet they now find themselves at the mercy of vanishing water bodies, extreme weather, and increasingly erratic rainfall. In neighboring communities, the story is much the same. Umoru Muazu, another farmer in Sokoto, remembers a time when water was plentiful. “The year we started, we had enough water, but now there is none. Before, the river wouldn’t dry up this early,” he says. His only option now is digging wells to irrigate crops outside the rainy season.
This local crisis mirrors a broader environmental catastrophe. Once-reliable water sources across northern Nigeria are shrinking, including Lake Chad, which has lost about 90% of its volume since the 1960s. Experts say the lack of data on smaller rivers and lakes has masked the scale of the problem in regions like Sokoto, but anecdotal accounts from farmers suggest widespread drying is underway. Dr. Isa Yusuf-Sokoto, an environmental scientist at Umaru Ali Shinkafi Polytechnic, links the problem directly to climate change and local deforestation. “Two-thirds of trees in Sokoto are now gone,” he says, citing rising temperatures, desertification, and prolonged droughts as compounding factors. “If there is no emergency intervention, Nigeria will face a multi-dimensional crisis—food, water, and health.”
Agricultural productivity is already showing signs of strain. According to AFEX, a licensed commodities exchange, cultivated land for maize—Nigeria’s most widely grown cereal—declined from 6.2 million hectares in 2021 to 5.8 million hectares in 2022. Nationally, agriculture’s contribution to Nigeria’s GDP dropped to 22% in Q2 2024, down from 25% in the previous quarter. Meanwhile, food imports reached a five-year high, highlighting rising domestic shortfalls. This comes as Nigeria’s population, currently over 220 million, is projected to reach 400 million by 2050, potentially making it the third most populous country in the world after India and China. Feeding such a population amid climate shocks will be a monumental challenge.
To address this, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has been promoting climate-smart agriculture, urging adaptive practices such as water-efficient irrigation, drought-resistant seeds, and improved land management. The Nigerian government has tasked agricultural research institutes with fast-tracking solutions, though farmers say support is yet to trickle down to those most in need. For now, farmers like Bello and Muazu continue to plant leeks and till dry soil, holding onto hope and improvising in the face of a slow-moving disaster.
