Consider the classic negotiation parable of two business owners fighting over a shipment of oranges; Without understanding their interdependence, they become involved in a bidding war. Someone pays too much; Others get nothing. The dialogue could reveal that one needs the juice, while the other needs the peel for excitement. Purchasing the shipments jointly would have met both needs at a lower cost. This enduring portrayal reflects a recurring system failure: as artists perform in silos, competition replaces coordination, shared values are eroded rather than created, and inefficiencies become normalized. As game theory's Robert Axelrod says, “In the long game, cooperative strategies statistically outperform aggressive ones.” Yet, despite its simplicity, this knowledge is conspicuously absent in the engineering of complex systems, including Nigeria's food and agriculture system.
At the heart of Nigeria's food and agriculture system is a truth we often overlook: the system is the people. Typically, when we imagine the food system, we picture crops, livestock, machinery, delivery trucks, and perhaps the lone figure of a hat-wearing farmer holding a corn cob. Yet each node depends on people and works through people: breeders, farmers, aggregators, processors, machine operators, researchers, state and federal MDAs, financiers, community leaders, transporters, technologists, and countless informal actors who work far from project documents but close to the realities of food.
This is why the food system cannot be easily changed by adjusting any one technical component. Systems resist single-entry solutions. Nevertheless, minimum viable solutions (MVs), are practical levers that establish a system for real change. Coordination in food systems is an important MVS, and this sociocultural side of change is missing. Over the years, we have invested heavily in inputs, infrastructure and technology, yet we get limited returns. Why? Because we have not invested enough in relational work that these investments can slowly materialize. The cost of this gap is measurable: whether we look at food inflation rates climbing above 35%, recurring farmer-farmer tensions, or 40% of produce wastage in post-harvest care, one theme comes up again: coordination gaps come with a high economic price tag.
'Soft' capabilities such as communication through structured dialogue, conflict mediation, transparency and accountability should be considered as core farming skills. Coordination must occur vertically, horizontally and diametrically; It is the connective tissue that aligns investment priorities and government directives to implementers and private sector incentives with social norms. For example, an improved seed variety is successful only when researchers coordinate with local growers and producers with market demand (customers and customers). When this alignment is maintained, innovation becomes both desirable and affordable.
“For years, we have invested heavily in inputs, infrastructure and technology, yet we get limited returns. Why? Because we have not invested nearly enough in the relational work that allows these investments to grow slowly.”
The question is no longer 'why' but 'how' we will build this flexible relational infrastructure, and the following three practical steps are essential as we formalize communication channels across the food system.
Stakeholders in the agricultural sector are coordinating vision and action around shared realities.
For vertical coordination, policies often fail because they are designed in isolation. We need mandatory ‘reality check’ policy labs, not token meetings, but structured sessions where senior policy influencers from all relevant MDAs meet with grassroots producers and local processors before launching major initiatives to confirm practical fit, for example, that loan terms match crop harvesting cycles. We must also reimagine the role of the Agricultural Extension Agent (AEA). Instead of simply pushing down technical advice, they should become policy translators. We need to empower them to become policy translators. They need communication training to simplify rules for communities and in upward reporting, conveying ground-level realities such as breakdowns in seed supply chains or local resource needs to policy makers. This reduces the gap between sector and central capital, leading to policies that have impact.
To coordinate horizontally, we need to reduce friction and increase impact across the entire ecosystem. Beyond business interactions, institutional coordination is important. Multilateral agencies and donors should establish 'alignment platforms' that move beyond mere information sharing to jointly defining priorities, eliminating duplicate funding and focusing deeper on real problem areas. At the grassroots level, communal and cluster platforms should be supported to organize themselves, manage dissent, and strengthen collective agency. Commodity-specific roundtables and market unions, when coordinated, can influence trade contracts, quality standards, and even policy direction, potentially eliminating price uncertainty, post-harvest losses, and the institutional frictions that derail progress.
Diametrical coordination is essential for stability. This involves the delicate work of managing competing interests, for example, around land use. Instead of sporadic and reactive interventions, we need institutionalized ‘regional conflict mediation platforms’, permanent, multi-stakeholder forums that include community leaders, farmer/pastoral representatives and security agencies, which proactively meet to resolve disputes before they escalate. Additionally, regulators and trade associations should convene joint regulatory review panels to ensure that new standards support both compliance and economic growth, reducing arbitrary barriers at key large-scale aggregation points, such as food hubs supplying cities.
As people inside and outside the system, disagreements are inevitable. The goal of the dialogue is not to forcibly unify perspectives, but to commit to four principles: consistently uniting, actively listening, building consensus where possible, and keeping the door open to engagement. Nigeria's diversity means that the 'desired future' looks different to a smallholder in Katsina, an aggregator in Kaduna, a processor in Kebbi, a transporter in Kogi, a trader in Mile 12, or a seed company in Zaria. This diversity is the context within which we must work, not a weakness.
Real progress depends on the discovery of reciprocity, and here cooperation becomes not a choice, but a strategy of survival. When we recognize that it is all we have to do to make the system work, coordinated action becomes the currency that allows the system to self-correct. So, to food system champions in the private, public and multilateral sectors: If we can get this human side right – our communication, collaboration and accommodation – we will find that our systems respond faster and more sustainably than we expected.
Folake Adebote is a consultant at Sahel Consulting Agriculture and Nutrition Limited
