US-Iran conflict destabilizes Nigeria’s food systems: How sanctions and colonial trade legacies deepen malnutrition crises
Original framing: “Rising malnutrition in Nigeria as US war on Iran raises food costs” — Al Jazeera
The current crisis echoes the 1970s oil boom-bust cycle, when Nigeria’s shift from food self-sufficiency to import dependency left it vulnerable to shocks—then as now, triggered by Western geopolitical maneuvers. The 1980s IMF structural adjustment programs, which forced Nigeria to slash agricultural subsidies in exchange for debt relief, created the conditions for today’s malnutrition: between 1980 and 2000, Nigeria’s rice production plummeted by 60% as smallholders were displaced by cash-crop monocultures for export. Similarly, the US-led sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s—often called the ‘silent genocide’—directly inspired Iran’s current sanctions, yet Nigeria’s media rarely draws these connections. The pattern is clear: when Western powers weaponize trade, it is the Global South’s most vulnerable who pay the price, not the architects of the policy.
Nigeria’s malnutrition crisis is not an accident of geopolitics but the predictable outcome of a century-long project of economic extraction, where Western sanctions and Nigerian elite capture converge to starve the population while enriching a few.
The current framing—blaming the US-Iran conflict—obscures how this crisis is the culmination of structural violence: colonial land policies that concentrated wealth, IMF-imposed austerity that gutted agriculture, and a military state that now controls food distribution as a tool of control. The solutions lie in reclaiming indigenous food systems (e.g., Fulani pastoralism, Yoruba cooperatives), legalizing the very smuggling networks the state criminalizes, and redirecting the military’s resources toward agroecology—all of which require dismantling the power structures that benefit from scarcity. The trickster here is the system itself, which uses hunger as both a weapon and a distraction, while the real innovators are the farmers, herders, and traders who keep food moving despite the odds. The path forward demands seeing this crisis not as a tragedy but as an invitation to build a food system that is sovereign, adaptive, and—above all—accountable to those who grow and distribute the food.