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Nigeria’s Federal Government formally launched a capacity-building phase for a national cassava bioethanol initiative this week, convening stakeholders from across the agricultural, regulatory, and energy sectors in Nasarawa State to address a crisis that officials say is bleeding the country’s largest staple crop value chain of 40 percent of its productive output, even as separate industry research puts food losses in Lagos State at up to half of total production before a single item reaches a consumer.
The two-day Capacity Building Workshop for Implementation of the Cassava Bio-Ethanol Value Chain Development Project, running March 11 and 12 in Nasarawa, brought together participants from the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, the Raw Materials Research and Development Council, North-Central state governments, and the Association of Cassava Producers and Processors. The gathering was convened by the Federal Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning under Minister Abubakar Atiku Bagudu, who was represented by the ministry’s Director of Economic Growth, Muhammed Auwal.
Auwal told participants that a core technical objective of the project was the reduction of post-harvest loss, which currently accounts for a 40 percent efficiency leak in the cassava value chain. He said the initiative would deploy strategic aggregation hubs and rapid processing technologies to compress the window between harvest and processing.
“We aim to minimise the window between harvest and processing, thereby preserving starch integrity and ensuring our output meets ASTM specifications for anhydrous ethanol,” he said, citing the American Society for Testing and Materials standards as the benchmark for fuel-grade bioethanol that Nigeria intends to produce for domestic blending.
The bioethanol programme forms part of a broader strategy to reduce Nigeria’s dependence on imported refined petroleum products. Officials confirmed that the initiative would produce Fuel Grade Ethanol for blending with Premium Motor Spirit, a policy alignment with the government’s long-term ambition to reduce the national energy import bill and ease the chronic foreign exchange pressure generated by fuel imports. Under the coordination of the Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission, the cassava bioethanol value chain has already been concessioned across Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones, providing an institutional scaffolding for the commercial phase now being prepared.
Ministry Permanent Secretary Dr Deborah Odoh, who also addressed the gathering, said the ministry was committed to sustained policy coordination and independent monitoring of all programme investments. She urged participants to translate workshop resolutions into measurable outcomes and instructed them to focus deliverables on the North-Central zone, which she described as critical to the programme’s agricultural supply chain.
The losses that the bioethanol programme is partly designed to address are well documented. Nigeria is the world’s largest cassava producer, accounting for 18 percent of global output with over 61 million metric tonnes grown annually, yet the country captures just two percent of the $183 billion global cassava processing market. The gap between production volume and market participation is attributable in part to the perishability of raw cassava roots, which begin to deteriorate within 24 to 48 hours of harvest under standard field conditions. Post-harvest losses for cassava alone account for approximately 35 percent of all root and tuber losses nationally, with poor road infrastructure, inadequate cold chain capacity, irregular power supply to processing plants, and a fragmented smallholder farming structure all identified as contributing factors.
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That structural fragmentation was the central theme of a separate industry event in Lagos on Thursday, where Origin Tech Group unveiled its Corporate Farm Model, a private-sector financing and technical management platform designed to aggregate smallholder farming operations into commercially viable production units. Executive Chairman Prince Samuel told attendees that approximately 50 percent of food produced in Lagos State never reaches consumers, citing supply chain inefficiencies rather than production failures as the primary source of waste. Chief Operating Officer Leo Edwards placed that inefficiency in a global context, drawing on Food and Agriculture Organisation data to illustrate the scale of Nigeria’s mechanisation deficit.
The global benchmark for mechanised agriculture, he said, is 1.5 horsepower per hectare. Nigeria currently operates at 0.0027 horsepower per hectare — a figure that places the country among the least mechanised agricultural economies on Earth, and one that structurally guarantees high losses regardless of how much crop is grown.
Lagos State Commissioner for Agriculture and Food Systems Abisola Olusanya endorsed the corporate farming model’s underlying logic, saying the country’s existing agricultural structure was not equipped to solve either the loss problem or the supply shortage. She described the continued reliance on millions of smallholder farmers operating independently, without shared logistics infrastructure, guaranteed offtake, or access to mechanised processing, as a structural choice with predictable and damaging consequences.
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The convergence of two simultaneous events — one convened by the federal government in Nasarawa, the other driven by the private sector in Lagos — illustrates the multi-directional pressure now building around Nigeria’s agricultural productivity crisis. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation has warned that as many as 34.7 million Nigerians could face severe food insecurity during the June to August 2026 lean season, a projection that reflects compounding risks from insecurity in food-producing areas, input cost inflation, and systemic losses in the post-harvest chain.
Farmers across Niger, Nasarawa, Kogi, and Kaduna states told Nairametrics in November 2025 that the cost of fertiliser, pesticides, and fuel had tripled over two years, making smallholder farming economically unviable for many and driving a visible withdrawal from agriculture among younger rural residents.
The cassava bioethanol initiative, if fully implemented, is expected to create a guaranteed industrial off-take market for cassava that does not exist at the consumption end of the food chain — providing farmers with a buyer for surplus or lower-grade crop that would otherwise perish. The programme is also designed to create structured financing for smallholder farmers, with the government working alongside financial institutions to provide agricultural credit at below-market rates, addressing one of the persistent barriers to investment at the farm level.
Whether the initiative will deliver at scale depends on execution timelines that the government has not yet publicly committed to. The Nasarawa workshop will conclude on Thursday, with participants from state governments, industry associations, and regulatory bodies expected to produce an implementation roadmap for North-Central operations. No date has been confirmed for a comparable exercise across the programme’s other zonal concessions.
