A Securities and Exchange Commission-licensed issuing house, Regius Capital Limited, has disclosed that bank credit to Nigeria’s agriculture sector rose from about N1.46 trillion at the end of 2021 to N3.81 trillion by January 2026, while identified agrifood capital-market issuance between 2020 and the first half of 2026 stood at about N1.73 trillion.
According to a new report by Regius Capital Limited and made a copy available to journalists on Monday in Akure, the Ondo State capital, examined formal agricultural financing between 2021 and the first half of 2026, covering bank credit, capital-market instruments, development finance institutions, private capital, public interventions and guarantees.
It was gathered that despite a sharp increase in financing to Nigeria’s agricultural sector, the growth in capital has not yet translated into a commensurate expansion in productive capacity.
The report, titled Financing Nigeria’s Agriculture: What Five Years of Credit, Capital and Output Data Reveal, however, said the increase in financing needed to be assessed against actual productive capacity, food demand and trade, rather than funding volumes alone.
It noted that Nigeria’s agricultural GDP reached about N103.9 trillion in 2025, while the annual household food bill was estimated at about N82 trillion.
The report cautioned that the sharp rise in nominal agricultural output should not automatically be interpreted as equivalent growth in real production, noting the effects of inflation, commodity prices and foreign exchange movements on headline figures.
On trade, it said Nigeria recorded about N5.07 trillion in agricultural exports and N4.76 trillion in agricultural imports in 2025.
It added that higher export earnings could sometimes reflect increases in global commodity prices rather than significant increases in physical export volumes, while continued reliance on agricultural imports pointed to opportunities for greater domestic production and processing.
Regius Capital also observed that institutional capital remained concentrated in agricultural businesses with scale, audited financial statements, identifiable cash flows, assets and established off-take arrangements.
It said primary production and other upstream activities remained significantly underrepresented in the tracked public-market financing space.
The report therefore called for innovative financing structures capable of making a wider range of agricultural projects investable.
It identified consortium-led project special purpose vehicles, blended and catalytic capital, guarantees and credit enhancement, milestone-based financing, longer-tenor project debt, commercial paper for working-capital cycles and aggregation of fragmented operators as possible solutions.
It said future growth would depend on the volume of capital available, where it was deployed, the tenor and cost of financing and the ability to transform agricultural value chains into bankable investment opportunities.
The firm concluded that Nigeria’s agricultural financing challenge was not only a question of insufficient capital but also a structuring problem.