Nigeria’s Lagos and Benue states are deepening their agricultural partnership under the Produce for Lagos programme, seeking to connect one of the country’s largest food-producing states with the country’s biggest urban consumer market while improving the movement of farm produce from production zones to processors, traders and consumers.
The partnership gained momentum in September 2026 when a Benue State delegation led by Deputy Governor Sam Ode visited Lagos and signed a Memorandum of Understanding on food security. The agreement is designed to create a more structured relationship in which Benue supplies agricultural produce while Lagos provides an organised market, processing capacity and distribution infrastructure.
Ode said the objective was to move beyond Benue’s long-standing description as Nigeria’s “Food Basket” and establish a commercial system in which the state’s agricultural output can reliably reach Lagos. Benue produces a wide range of crops, including tubers, grains and cash crops, creating opportunities to supply Lagos’ large and diversified food market.
Rice is an important part of the opportunity. Lagos is already investing heavily in rice processing through the Imota Rice Mill, which the state says has an annual capacity of 2.4 million 50-kilogramme bags of rice. The mill produced more than 500,000 bags of Eko Rice during the year covered by the state’s 2026 production year, while Lagos has continued working with farmers and partners to strengthen paddy supply.
The Benue partnership also fits into Lagos’ wider attempt to redesign how food enters and moves through the state. Lagos says more than 70% of the food consumed in the state is produced outside its borders, making transportation, aggregation, storage and market access critical parts of food security. Its emerging network of fresh-food hubs is intended to reduce unnecessary layers of intermediation, cut post-harvest losses and make distribution more organised.
At the centre of this strategy is the Lagos Central Food Security Systems and Logistics Hub at Epe. The facility is being developed as a major aggregation and logistics platform connecting agricultural production with storage, processing and distribution. Lagos has said the hub is designed to handle more than 1,500 trucks daily and support the storage, aggregation, processing and distribution of more than 1.5 million tonnes of food annually when fully operational.
The state is also backing the Produce for Lagos programme with a ₦500 billion (about $375 million) Offtake Guarantee Fund, intended to provide greater certainty for farmers, aggregators, logistics operators and investors. The concept is to move agricultural production away from an entirely supply-driven model by giving producers greater confidence that there will be an organised market for their output.
For Benue, the opportunity is to convert agricultural abundance into stronger commercial value chains. The state is simultaneously pursuing larger agro-industrial investments, including a proposed National Food City Complex that is expected to integrate production, processing and market access across crops including rice, cassava and maize.
For Lagos, the partnership addresses a different challenge: feeding a huge urban population efficiently. Rather than attempting to produce all its food within the state, the strategy is increasingly based on building structured relationships with production states and investing in the infrastructure required to move food more efficiently across the country.
NBF Insight
The Lagos–Benue partnership illustrates a critical shift in African food systems: food security is not only about producing more; it is also about connecting where food is produced with where it is consumed.
Benue has land, farmers and agricultural output. Lagos has a massive consumer market, processing infrastructure, and growing logistics capacity. The commercial opportunity lies in connecting the two efficiently.
If the partnership develops into reliable offtake arrangements, better aggregation, improved logistics and stronger paddy and commodity supply chains, it could reduce some of the friction between Nigeria’s production zones and major urban markets.
The bigger lesson is that Nigeria does not necessarily need every state to produce everything. It needs stronger inter-state food corridors that move crops from farms to processors, markets and consumers with less waste, fewer bottlenecks and greater value captured by producers.
