Lagos remains the most ambitious city-state in Africa in terms of bridging the infrastructure gaps to modernize the state; with over seven million passenger trips a day, the state is building rail, waterways- ferries, and bus service systems. In addition, the State is expanding on road infrastructure network, health facility, investment in education, energy, and several enterprise interventions. Over the years, the agriculture and food systems sector received little attention as the aforementioned sectors. Ironically, the city’s semi-formal and informal sectors is largely dominated by food and other related businesses, and several millions of people depend on this sector for their livelihood.
Today, the Lagos food market size is N9 billion in daily transaction value and N5.89 trillion annually, but has remained unorganized to enable the needed corrections and data mining, particularly towards commercial scale investments and innovations. Though Lagos is the largest in terms of IGR in Nigeria, the food systems sector is one of the lowest contributors to the State’s revenue generation drive. The COVID-19 pandemic lock down and it effects, the food strikes embarked on by Food associations across the years have revealed the vulnerability of Lagos food systems and the need for urgent intervention by stakeholders to guarantee the food security of the state.
As a proactive frontline city, Lagos is positioned for the realities of a fasting changing global supply chain developments, i.e the African continental free trade agreement may impact on food systems given the huge dependence of the West African coastal countries on food trade with Lagos through the land borders; a large logistics hub plays an important role in data gathering, assist government in its agility to respond to changes, stem inflation, improve revenue generation, reduce food/environmental waste generation and reduce traffic leading to a decrease in carbon emission/footprint.
Recent efforts
The Lagos central food security system & logistics hub is designed to be the central point for food aggregation, storage, processing, logistics and distribution in the State. It is the first point to where all food items meant for Lagos will be graded for consumption standards, for dealers to collect – purchase – break bulk into smaller units for onward distribution to middle level and last-mile markets around the State.
The implementation of the reform will pave-way for the modernization, reorganization, and a state-of-the-art data driven food and agriculture systems where various players/actors in the marketing channels interact freely from the producers to consumers, storage, Logistics, packaging, processing, and sale etc., to address prevailing market challenges of inadequate infrastructure, food shortages, fragmentation, low standards, inadequate data and comprehensive security architecture to safeguard facilities and investments that will be put in place.
Furthermore, it will involve strategic gathering and development of Marketing research information, dissemination, and promotions to ensure that all players are availed with information that will enhance effective and free flow of trade. Also, it will give the public an enabling platform to interact with food value chain actors without necessarily being physically present in the market.
