Every season brings the same lament from the people who plan our food policy: that each young person who leaves the village, each agronomist who boards a flight to Manchester, each able-bodied hand who takes the road to Lagos or Aba is a withdrawal from a food system that can no longer afford the loss. It is a tidy story, and it is mostly wrong.
Labour leaving the land is not new. Migratory labour within Nigeria has always moved with the seasons, the harvests and the price of grain. What has changed is the vocabulary. We now call it brain drain, attach a hashtag to it, and treat a very old pattern as a fresh emergency. Roughly 1.8 million young Nigerians enter the urban labour market every year, and about 40 per cent of internal migrants leave rural areas to do it. They are not abandoning agriculture out of disloyalty. They are doing the calculation the rest of us pretend not to see.
Here is the part that the lament steps around. It is hard to make gruelling manual labour enticing to an educated or ambitious young person, and harder still to argue that they owe their lives to a hoe because they happened to be born into a farming community. To what extent should anyone be held to the land by accident of birth? The question answers itself. People go where the money is. That is not a moral failing; it is a rational response to a market that has never paid farm labour what it costs the body.
None of these waves away the real loss. Losing skilled people – agronomists, agricultural engineers, extension officers – is a more serious matter than losing bodies from the field, and the two are constantly confused. More than 75,000 Nigerian doctors now work abroad. At the same time, fewer than 35,000 remain for a population of 200 million, and the same outflow quietly drains the agricultural sciences of the people who would modernise them. A tractor can be imported. The judgement of an extension officer who has read a particular soil for twenty years can. That knowledge does not return on a five-year loan.
Then there is the fear that fewer farmers means a drift toward cash crops and away from food security, that thinned-out, strategic smallholders will plant what sells abroad and let the national plate go empty. I don’t believe the evidence carries the alarm. Much of what we read as falling food-crop production is an artefact of how we count: the trade in food-security crops is overwhelmingly informal, and we tend to measure only what is exported or delivered to a processor. Market access, not ethics or patriotism, decides what a farmer grows. Change the route to market, and you change the crop long before any sermon about national duty lands.
The same misreading colours how we talk about imported food. A shopper who reaches for imported rice or frozen poultry over the local version is not telling you the country has run short. They are telling you something about price, availability, and distribution. Imported food moves inside structured supply chains built to put product on a Lagos shelf reliably, week after week. Local produce too often arrives despite the system rather than because of it. The consumer is not being unpatriotic; they are buying what is on the shelf when they need it, at a price they can pay.
Which is where the more interesting part of the story sits and where we spend the least attention: remittances. In 2024, recorded inflows reached about 20.93 billion dollars, up roughly 8.9 percent on the year and worth close to 4 percent of national output. The money runs in two directions: policy rarely bothers to separate urban Nigerians sending money to rural relatives and the diaspora sending money home. A study in the Enugu metropolis found that half of migrants remit monthly for community development, and more than 53 per cent still carry membership in their rural development associations. This is an example of capital arriving where formal credit will not.
Diaspora capital has built real things. Migrant money out of Aba has seeded poultry farms, oil-palm plantations and garri-processing yards, and in some places it has carried families from subsistence plots into commercial rice. Pooled through hometown associations and age grades, it has paid for the markets, the access roads and the generators that keep a rural mill turning when the grid gives up. Where the state has been absent, the diaspora has quietly underwritten the infrastructure that farming sits on.
Both readings are partly right, which is the difficulty. Remittance is not a clean good, and pretending otherwise is how it sours. Money sent home can harden into a new dependency and, handled carelessly, into a channel for further rural extraction rather than repair. The diaspora tends to spot a need in its newfound surroundings that it believes can be solved through its connection to “home”, wherever home now is, and ends up funding a solution the home neither asks for nor can sustain. A steady inflow can also dull the appetite to work the land at all; a rentier habit sets in, where the young wait on sponsorship to leave rather than reasons to stay. For some households, especially the elderly, the money goes entirely to food and medicine. Consumption is steadied, and nothing is added to what the farm can actually produce.
Should this matter? It depends. For a household with deep family ties and no bank that will lend to it, remittance is not a distortion but a lifeline. The honest position is that the same flow can build capacity in one village and hollow out the will to farm in the next, and that the difference is rarely the size of the cheque. It is whether anyone, at either end of the transfer, treats it as an investment rather than a rescue.
So the question worth asking is not how to keep people on the land, or how to shame them into staying; the net outflow has, in any case, been narrowing for years. The question is whether the money migration sends back is building something that outlasts the next harvest or merely softening a decline we have chosen not to look at directly. Migration is remaking Nigerian agriculture either way. Whether it remakes it through extraction or through investment is, for now, still a decision and not yet a verdict.
About the author:
Cobi-Jane Akinrele is the founder of Aké Collective, working with over 1,000 smallholder farmers in Nigeria’s highland states (Plateau, Bauchi, and Taraba) to build traceable, EUDR-compliant supply chains for soy, coffee, and fonio. Born in the UK with Nigerian roots, she studied at Cambridge and holds a master’s in African Studies. She writes about supply chains, compliance, and the realities of building food systems from the inside in her newsletter, Highland Lens.
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