Nigeria's farmers are getting billions in credit — so why isn't the food system growing?

For anyone tracking capital flows in Africa, Nigeria's agricultural lending numbers look like a triumph. Bank credit to the sector has ballooned from about N1.46 trillion at the end of 2021 to N3.81 trillion by January 2026, according to a fresh report from Regius Capital Limited, a Securities and Exchange Commission-licensed issuing house. Add in agrifood capital-market issuance of roughly N1.73 trillion between 2020 and the first half of 2026, and you have a financing boom that would make most emerging-market policymakers envious. But here's the uncomfortable truth the report, titled 'Financing Nigeria's Agriculture: What Five Years of Credit, Capital and Output Data Reveal,' lays bare: the money has flowed, yet the farms haven't transformed.

The report, which Regius Capital shared with journalists on Monday in Akure, the Ondo State capital, examined formal agricultural financing from 2021 through the first half of 2026, spanning bank credit, capital-market instruments, development finance institutions, private capital, public interventions, and guarantees. The headline finding is stark: despite this sharp increase in financing, the growth in capital has not translated into a commensurate expansion in productive capacity. Nigeria's agricultural GDP reached roughly N103.9 trillion in 2025, while the annual household food bill was estimated at about N82 trillion. Those are big numbers, but the report cautions against reading them as genuine progress, noting that inflation, commodity prices, and foreign exchange movements have all inflated nominal output. In plain terms, the naira figures look impressive; the actual harvests tell a different story.

For outsiders, it's worth understanding who Regius Capital is and why this report matters. As an SEC-licensed issuing house, Regius sits at the intersection of corporate finance and agriculture, the kind of institution that structures deals, raises capital, and advises companies on how to access the markets. Its analysis isn't academic — it's a signal to investors, banks, and development partners about where the real bottlenecks sit. The report's trade data underscores the point: Nigeria recorded about N5.07 trillion in agricultural exports and N4.76 trillion in agricultural imports in 2025. On the surface, that looks like a trade surplus. But Regius warns that higher export earnings can simply reflect rising global commodity prices rather than more physical volume, while the continued reliance on imports points to a persistent gap in domestic production and processing. In other words, Nigeria is still paying for food it could grow itself.

The deeper problem, as the report frames it, is structural. Institutional capital has concentrated in agricultural businesses with scale, audited financial statements, identifiable cash flows, assets, and established off-take arrangements. That's a polite way of saying the money is going to the big players with paperwork, while primary production and upstream activities — the smallholder farmers who actually grow the food — remain dramatically underrepresented in public-market financing. This is a classic African capital-market story: the formal financial system rewards formality, and most of Nigeria's agriculture is stubbornly informal. The report's prescription is a set of innovative financing structures designed to make a wider range of agricultural projects investable: consortium-led project special purpose vehicles, blended and catalytic capital, guarantees and credit enhancement, milestone-based financing, longer-tenor project debt, commercial paper for working-capital cycles, and aggregation of fragmented operators.

What does this mean for the wider continent? Nigeria's agricultural financing challenge is not simply a question of insufficient capital — it's a structuring problem. The money exists, but the vehicles to deploy it effectively into smallholder agriculture, processing, and value chains are missing. That's a lesson for anyone watching African agrifood investment, from Nairobi to Accra. The report's conclusion is clear: future growth will depend not just on the volume of capital available, but on where it is deployed, the tenor and cost of financing, and the ability to turn agricultural value chains into bankable investment opportunities. For a country where food inflation and import bills are perennial political flashpoints, this isn't an abstract debate — it's about whether the billions flowing into agriculture will ever actually feed the nation.