You Cannot Secure a Supply Chain You Cannot See” Agbabiaka on Need for Visibility in Agro Supply Chain

Salami Adeyinka

Jibril Agbabiaka has worked in agricultural procurement and supply chain operations across West Africa. He founded an agricultural technology platform, and has published valuable research on procurement systems, trade infrastructure, and supply chain governance in agriculture. In this interview, we spoke with Agbaiaka about agricultural trade infrastructure deficits in West Africa.

Governments are spending heavily on agricultural trade right now. Export programmes, trade missions, supply chain security directives. Is the money going to the right place?

The policy attention is overdue and welcome. But there is a pattern I have seen in every market I have worked in. A government commits serious resources to expanding agricultural exports or securing food supply chains. The funding flows. The trade missions happen. And then somewhere between the announcement and the actual movement of goods, the whole thing loses momentum. The policy was sound. The operational infrastructure to execute it was not.

You cannot expand exports if the procurement systems to source the product reliably do not exist. You cannot secure a supply chain you cannot see. You cannot reduce input costs for farmers without data-driven systems that give planners the visibility to forecast and negotiate. These are infrastructure problems masquerading as policy problems. And they tend to receive a fraction of the attention and funding that the policy layer receives.

What do you mean by infrastructure in this context?

The data layer. The documentation systems that verify who produced what, in what quantity, with what reliability. The procurement systems that match supply to demand based on verified information rather than relationships and guesswork. The cross-border documentation and compliance systems that allow goods to clear customs predictably rather than sitting in port accumulating charges while paperwork is assembled by hand.

In most industries, this infrastructure is invisible because it works. In agricultural commerce, particularly where production is fragmented or supply chains cross borders, it is invisible because it was never built. That distinction matters enormously. The absence of this layer is the reason capital does not flow to farmers who need it, the reason trade programmes underperform their potential, and the reason supply chains remain fragile despite enormous investment in making them resilient.

The International Finance Corporation puts the smallholder financing gap in Sub-Saharan Africa at $65 billion. You have argued that this is misdiagnosed as a capital problem. Why?

Because the capital is there. Lenders exist who would finance agricultural transactions if they could evaluate the risk. Buyers exist who would source from smallholder producers if they could verify supply. That $65 billion measures how much capital is stuck, waiting for information infrastructure that would allow it to move.

Every agricultural finance initiative I have studied or worked inside has eventually run into the same wall. You build a lending product, you go to deploy it, and you discover that the farmer you want to lend to has no documented transaction history, no verified production record, no financial profile that your risk model can process. At that point you either absorb risk you cannot price, which collapses eventually, or you retreat to a smaller population that happens to be better documented, which leaves the problem intact. The data layer has to come first. A decade of failed or stalled agricultural finance initiatives has made that case more persuasively than any research paper could.

You have published on cross-border trade friction and port logistics costs. Is the same problem present at the border?

It is basically the same problem, different mechanics. Moving agricultural goods across a border requires documentation that satisfies customs authorities, regulatory standards, and the compliance requirements of the buyer on the other side. When those documentation systems are manual, fragmented, or inconsistent, everything slows down and everything costs more. Demurrage charges accumulate. Broker performance varies wildly with no standardised way to measure it. Compliance errors compound at volume.

The popular assumption is that tariffs are the primary barrier to agricultural trade. In my experience, and in what I have found through research, the paperwork creates more practical friction than the tariff rate itself. A ten percent tariff is a known cost that can be priced into a transaction. A three-week delay at port because documentation was incomplete is an unknown cost that cannot. Rebuilding agricultural trade means rebuilding the documentation and data systems that underpin it, and that work has barely started in most markets.

You are describing problems in emerging markets. Do these apply in developed economies as well?

Across different markets, the severity is different. Yet, the structure is remarkably similar. Any agricultural supply chain where visibility degrades as you move upstream from the retailer or processor toward the farm gate faces a version of this problem. Any system that depends on fragmented supplier bases, manual procurement, or broker networks without standardised performance metrics carries the same friction. In developed economies this friction tends to be hidden during stable periods and then surfaces rapidly under stress, when input costs spike, when trade routes are disrupted, when a supply chain that appeared resilient turns out to have been merely undisturbed.

The reason I have spent time publishing on these problems, rather than only working on them commercially, is that the underlying systems challenge travels across contexts. A predictive procurement model that reduces waste in one fragmented agricultural supply chain solves for the same structural failure wherever that failure appears. The data environments look different. The architecture of the problem does not change.

Where does this go? What would it take for agricultural trade infrastructure to catch up with the policy ambition around it?

It requires treating the data and documentation layer as primary rather than as something that will sort itself out once enough money is flowing. That means procurement systems that give supply chain planners real visibility into what is available, where, and at what capacity. It means documentation infrastructure that makes a farmer or supplier verifiable to a financial institution without requiring them to navigate systems designed for a completely different kind of counterparty. It means cross-border systems where compliance and verification are built into the transaction rather than bolted on afterward.

None of this is technologically exotic. These capabilities exist in other industries. The question is whether the agricultural sector, and the governments investing in it, will treat the infrastructure layer with the same seriousness they treat the policy layer. If they do, the billions being spent on trade promotion, supply chain security, and farmer support will deliver what they promise. If they do not, agricultural trade will continue to underperform its potential, and the explanation will be the same one it has been for years: the systems needed to execute were never in place. That is the gap I have spent my career working inside, and it remains, in my view, the most consequential unsolved problem in agricultural commerce.