Nigeria must do more to insulate its food systems from global shocks – GM Golden Fertilizer

Tayo Ilori is the General Manager of Golden Fertilizer Limited, a subsidiary of Flour Mills of Nigeria Plc, and a leading agro-allied company specialising in fertiliser blending, distribution and supply.

In this interview with JOSEPHINE OKOJIE-OKEIYI, he spoke about the impact of the Iran war on Nigeria’s fertiliser industry and how Golden Fertilizer is navigating the challenge to ensure availability for smallholder farmers.

How much has the ongoing Iran war affected Nigeria’s fertiliser industry?
The impact is certainly significant, although possibly not as strong as elsewhere. The conflict has already disrupted global gas and petrochemical production to a considerable degree, and these are foundational to fertiliser production.

The immediate effects we are seeing are sharp increases in the price of critical fertiliser raw materials, as well as elevated freight costs and overall supply chain uncertainty.

For Nigeria, this is yet another reminder that national food security cannot be outsourced. External shocks like this will recur, and the real question we confront is how resilient our local systems are.

The good news is that Nigeria has made progress in building domestic capacity, but there is still a lot more to be done to fully insulate the sector from global disruptions.

The Iran conflict is disrupting global fertiliser supplies. How is Golden Fertilizer navigating this challenge, and what strategies are you implementing to ensure availability for Nigerian farmers?
Our response has been deliberate and forward-looking. We are de-risking our supply chain by deepening local sourcing where possible and maintaining flexible sourcing partnerships across multiple markets.

More importantly, we are focused on ensuring continuity for the farmer, seeing as we are on the cusp of the commencement of the 2026 planting season. That means anticipating demand, strengthening inventory buffers, and aligning production cycles more closely with the realities of the season.

In times like this, the role of a leading player is not just to react, but to help stabilise the system. Our priority is to limit the vulnerability of Nigerian farmers and, by extension, domestic food security, to such global volatility.

Nigeria is endowed with some of the raw materials for fertiliser formulation such as urea, limestone and ammonia. What is your strategy for increasing local sourcing, and how does it impact your operations and the broader economy?
Our strategy is to leverage these raw material endowments to move beyond basic blending into more integrated, locally anchored fertiliser production, supported by partnerships within the domestic industrial ecosystem.

The impact goes beyond our business. Increased local sourcing eases pressure on domestic foreign exchange resources, strengthens raw material beneficiation and industrial linkage, creates jobs, and ultimately helps build a more self-reliant agricultural economy. It is both a business imperative and a national priority.

Nigeria’s fertiliser application rates are among the lowest globally. As a leading fertiliser producer, what’s Golden Fertilizer’s strategy to increase fertiliser adoption among Nigerian farmers, and how are you making it more accessible and affordable?
The reality is that fertiliser use in Nigeria is not just low, it is structurally constrained. Farmers are not unwilling to use more fertiliser or to bring fertiliser application to optimal levels; they are often unable—due to cost, access, and limited awareness of the associated benefits.

Our approach to closing these gaps is three-fold: bringing products closer to farmers through stronger distribution networks, enabling access through structured financing and partnerships, and demonstrating value through on-ground trials, demonstration, and Agric extension support.

Adoption is ultimately driven by trust and results. When farmers see a clear improvement in yield at harvest and, consequently, income, an increase in fertiliser usage/hectare becomes a business decision, not a gamble.

How do you balance commercial goals with sustainability in your leadership at Golden Fertilizer?
We see sustainability not as a tradeoff, but as a driver of long-term profitability and resilience. If farmers are not productive, if soils are degraded, or if value chains are inefficient, then food sustainability becomes unsustainable.

Therefore, our approach is to focus on things such as precision crop nutrition―encouraging the use and application of fertilisers in a manner amenable to soil conditions to prevent runoff, waste, and soil degradation.

This is one of the ways in which we bring our scientific know-how to bear in supporting farmers, aligning our supply of fertilizer and other agri-inputs with farmer-centric interventions that drive productivity (crop yield) improvements while preserving resources and supporting ecosystems.

Our goal is to build a system where economic value, resource regeneration and preservation, and environmental responsibility reinforce each other.

What’s your take on Nigeria’s food security challenges, and how can companies like FMN Group help address them?
The foundational problem is low productivity. To restrict our analysis to crop production, Nigeria produces an extensive range of crops. But across most of these various crop value chains, we still operate at suboptimal yields, which compounds into significant losses across the value chain.

Our belief is that food security will not be solved by increasing the amount of land placed under cultivation to produce crops alone, but by improving yield per hectare and then harnessing those productivity gains downstream, boosting efficiency across the value chain.

Which is why FMN fully backs farmers in achieving yield transformation through interventions across the value chain to break the bottlenecks that inhibit the ecosystem from realising its potential by providing the right seeds with great yield potential backed by the right fertiliser for specific crop nutrition, and finally, the agronomy extension services to aid good agricultural practices.

How can the government make agriculture attractive to youths?
It’s not that young people in Nigeria do not find agriculture appealing per se. It’s that as long as the sector remains fragmented, unstructured, and offers low returns, they would remain hesitant to venture into it.

In addition, I believe there is insufficient appreciation of the broad scope of agricultural and food systems, the opportunities they offer, and the ways in which young people can participate in them.

Which is why we believe that the way to attract them is to emphasise that agriculture is not a rural social intervention project of government, but a vast arena of business opportunities, which include but extend beyond farming and where contemporary innovation creates promising opportunities.

Some young people already recognise this, which is why, despite all of the challenges or you might say because of them, the country today has a budding agricultural technology (agritech) ecosystem led by young people, making an impact, supporting farmers, helping address various challenges.

So, the question is, what are we doing to champion those who are attempting to introduce these innovative solutions into the agriculture and food systems space, and creating agribusinesses in the process? What government policies can encourage them? What bottlenecks can the government help remove? What mechanisms can be put in place to derisk the system? When agricultural ventures become predictable, profitable, and scalable, youth participation will follow naturally.

Can you give an assessment of agricultural development in Nigeria today, and areas of lapses you have noticed that should be fixed?
I’m going to keep it brief. There is increasing private sector participation, and policy is increasingly aware of what it needs to do, and certain steps are now being taken.

However, we need to do more to bring the best science to bear on the sector to drive productivity, invest in extension services to encourage good agronomic practices, increase the intensity of the infrastructure that underlies not just primary production, but storage to curb post-harvest loss, and better coordinate value chains through the appropriate use of data.

These measures ultimately serve the purpose of derisking the sector, which then makes it more appealing to capital providers who make financing more viable. Agriculture is one sector that needs a lot of patient capital.