Consider the classic negotiation parable of two business owners fighting over a shipment of oranges; without understanding their interdependence, they engage in a bidding war. One pays excessively; the other gets nothing. Dialogue could have revealed that one needed the juice, while the other needed the peel for zest. Jointly purchasing the shipment would have met both needs at a lower cost.
This enduring illustration captures a recurring systems failure: as actors perform in silos, competition replaces coordination, shared value is destroyed rather than created, and inefficiencies become normalised.
As Robert Axelrod of game theory observes, “In the long game, cooperative strategies statistically outperform aggression”. Yet, despite its simplicity, this knowledge remains strikingly absent in the engineering of complex systems, including Nigeria’s food and agriculture system.
At the centre of Nigeria’s food and agriculture system lies a truth we often overlook: systems are people. Usually, when we visualise the food system, we picture crops, livestock, machinery, distribution trucks, and perhaps the solitary figure of a farmer in a hat holding a cob of maize. Yet every node rests on people and functions through people: breeders, farmers, aggregators, processors, machine operators, researchers, state and federal MDAs, financiers, community leaders, transporters, technologists, and the countless informal actors who operate far from project documents but close to the realities of food.
This is why the food system cannot be easily transformed by adjusting a single technical component. Systems resist single-entry solutions. Still, there are Minimum Viable Solutions (MVS), practical levers that set a system up for real transformation. Coordination is a critical MVS in the food system, and this sociological side of transformation is the missing piece. For years, we have invested heavily in inputs, infrastructure, and technology, yet we see limited returns.
Why? Because we have not invested nearly enough in the relational work that allows these investments to land softly. The cost of this gap is measurable: whether we look at food inflation rates climbing past 35%, the recurring farmer–herder tensions, or the 40% of produce lost to post-harvest handling, one theme recurs: coordination gaps carry a high economic price tag.
“Soft” capabilities such as communication, conflict mediation, transparency, and accountability through structured dialogue must be treated as core agricultural skills. Coordination must happen vertically, horizontally, and diametrically; it is the connective tissue that aligns investment priorities and implementing actors with government direction, and private-sector incentives with societal norms. For instance, an improved seed variety succeeds only when researchers coordinate with local producers and producers with market demand (clients and customers). When this alignment holds, innovation becomes both desired and affordable.
The question is no longer “why”, but “how” we will build this resilient relational infrastructure, and the following are three practical steps essential as we formalise dialogue channels across the food system.
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 across all relevant MDAs meet grassroots producers and local processors before launching major initiatives to confirm practical fit, for instance, that loan terms match the crop harvest cycle. We must also re-imagine the role of the Agricultural Extension Agent (AEA). Rather than simply pushing technical advice downward, they must become Policy Translators.
We need to empower them to become Policy Translators. They need communication training to simplify regulations for communities and, in upward reporting, to convey ground-level realities, like a breakdown in the seed supply chain or a local resource need, to policymakers. This closes the gap between the field and the central capital, producing policies that impact.
For horizontal coordination, we must reduce friction and amplify impact across the ecosystem. Beyond commercial interactions, institutional coordination is crucial. Multilateral agencies and donors must establish “Alignment For a” that move beyond mere information sharing towards jointly defining priorities, eliminating duplicated funding, and enabling a deeper focus on real problem areas. At the grassroots, communal and cluster platforms must be supported to self-organise, manage dissent, and strengthen collective agency. Commodity-specific roundtables and market associations, when coordinated, can influence trade contracts, quality standards, and even policy direction, potentially eliminating price uncertainty, post-harvest losses, and the institutional friction that derails progress.
Diametrical Coordination is essential for stability. It involves the delicate work of managing competing interests, for instance, around land use. Rather than sporadic and reactive interventions, we need institutionalised “Regional Conflict Mediation Platforms”, permanent, multi-stakeholder forums comprising community leaders, farmer/herder representatives, and security agencies that meet proactively to resolve disputes before they escalate. Furthermore, Regulators and trade associations must convene Joint Regulatory Review Panels to ensure new standards support both compliance and economic growth, reducing arbitrary bottlenecks at major large-scale aggregation points, such as food hubs supplying cities
As people of and within the system, disagreements are inevitable. The goal of dialogue is not to forcefully homogenise perspectives, but to commit to four principles: reconvene consistently, listen actively, build consensus where possible, and keep the door open to engagement. Nigeria’s diversity means 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 we must work within, not a weakness.
Real progress depends on discovering reciprocity, and here collaboration becomes a survival strategy, not an option. When we recognise that we are all we have to make the system function, coordinated action becomes the currency that allows the system to self-correct. So, to the food system champions across the private, public, and multilateral sectors: If we can get this human side right, our communication, cooperation, and accommodation, we may find that our systems respond faster and more sustainably than we ever dared to expect.
By Folake Adebote, consultant at Sahel Consulting Agriculture and Nutrition Limited