Farmer-Herder Conflict, Livelihood Disruption, and Agricultural Production Sustainability in North Central Nigeria

Abstract

The North Central zone of Nigeria, long regarded as the country's food basket owing to its fertile land and favourable climate, has in the past decade experienced recurrent and increasingly destructive farmer-herder conflict that threatens both household livelihoods and the zone's capacity to sustain national food production. A substantial literature documents the political, ethnic, and security dimensions of this conflict, and a separate literature examines Nigeria's food security challenges more generally, yet comparatively little research has systematically traced how specific conflict-induced disruptions to farming and pastoral livelihoods, namely farm abandonment, loss of livestock assets, restricted access to farmland and grazing routes, and displacement, aggregate into measurable declines in agricultural production sustainability at the zonal level. This article addresses that gap by examining the specific problem of how farmer- herder conflict disrupts household livelihood assets in North Central Nigeria and, through this disruption, undermines the sustainability of agricultural production in the zone, drawing on the states of Benue, Plateau, Nasarawa, and Kogi as illustrative cases. Applying the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework as its theoretical lens, the article argues that conflict operates on food security primarily by eroding the natural, physical, financial, human, and social capital assets upon which farming and pastoral households depend, rather than through crop destruction alone. Using a qualitative, document-based methodology synthesising conflict reports, agricultural output data, and livelihoods literature, the article finds that repeated livelihood- asset erosion, compounded by displacement and diminished access to extension and credit services, is producing a cumulative and self-reinforcing decline in production sustainability that outlasts individual conflict incidents. The article concludes with livelihood-centred recommendations for sustaining agricultural production amid ongoing conflict.

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