FG Unveils AI-powered Crop Surveillance System to Tackle Food Insecurity  

In a major push to strengthen Nigeria’s food security architecture, the federal government has launched the country’s first satellite/ AI-powered national crop monitoring system, a platform designed to provide real-time intelligence on crop production, land use and emerging food security threats to support policy decisions.

The initiative, unveiled through a Memorandum of Understanding signed in Ben Guerir, Morocco, is expected to address one of the country’s biggest agricultural challenges—the lack of reliable, in-season data on what farmers are actually cultivating and producing across the federation.

The agreement, signed by the Presidential Food Systems Coordinating Unit (PFSCU), Morocco’s OCP Africa and a geospatial technology company, Ground Truth Analytics, will see the technology deployed in phases across 15 priority states before wider expansion.

Deputy Chief of Staff to the President (Office of the Vice President), Senator Ibrahim Hassan Hadejia, signed the agreement on behalf of the Federal Government at the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, representing Vice President Kashim Shettima in his capacity as Chairperson of the Presidential Food Systems Coordinating Unit.

According to a statement issued yesterday by the Technical Assistant on Agriculture to the President and Executive Secretary of the PFSCU, Marion Moon, the agreement also marked the formal launch of the National Agro-Productivity System (NAPS), which will provide federal and state governments with AI-generated intelligence on crop yields, available farmland and food security risks nationwide.

The development comes as the Tinubu administration intensifies efforts to strengthen food security three years after declaring a national emergency on the sector in July 2023 amid soaring food prices triggered by economic reforms. 

At the height of the crisis in early 2025, food inflation climbed above 40 per cent year-on-year, while insecurity, flooding, climate shocks and weak agricultural data systems further constrained production and planning.

Speaking at the signing ceremony, Hadejia said Nigeria must move beyond simply adopting modern agricultural technologies to developing local capacity to improve and adapt them to the country’s unique conditions.

“The problems we face should not define the limits of our ambition. They should inspire us to develop the technologies, institutions, and capabilities required to overcome them”, he said.

According to him, agriculture is increasingly being transformed by data, artificial intelligence, precision agriculture and geospatial technologies, insisting that Nigeria must build the expertise to deploy and continuously refine such innovations.

He said the platform would strengthen seasonal planning, agricultural investment, productivity monitoring and policy coordination by providing governments with timely and reliable agricultural intelligence for decision-making.

“Our ambition goes beyond the deployment of technology. We seek to build a Nigerian capability that is adapted to our conditions, understood and managed by our institutions, supported by Nigerian expertise, and sustained through knowledge transfer, institutional capacity development, and continuous learning”, Hadejia added.

Moon explained that the initiative was conceived to bridge the persistent gap between farmers’ planting declarations and actual production outcomes, a deficiency she described as one of the biggest weaknesses in Nigeria’s agricultural planning.

“Monitoring during the season has been our biggest weakness. We reach the end of a season and find we did not hit the targets we saw at the beginning”, she said.

She noted that real-time monitoring would enable government to know whether farmers planted the crops they initially declared, preventing costly policy mistakes involving food reserves, imports and exports.

 “If a farmer said they were going to plant maize, did they actually plant maize, or did they switch back to rice? If we believed everyone was leaving rice and opened our reserves accordingly, only to discover they planted rice after all, we end up with a surplus,” she explained.

Moon said the National Agro-Productivity System operates within the National Agribusiness Policy Mechanism, a framework approved by the National Council on Agriculture and Food Security in November 2024 to balance domestic production, strategic reserves, imports and exports.

She disclosed that the mechanism had already been piloted across 13 states covering the major wet season, dry season and an additional planting cycle, reaching about 250,000 farmers, surveying more than 50,000 producers in over 2,000 communities and collecting more than one million agricultural data points across five major commodities.

Chief Executive Officer of OCP Africa, Alafifi Laadel, described the agreement as a long-term partnership focused on building Nigerian capacity rather than merely supplying technology.

“The partnership reflects a shared commitment to building long-term capability through knowledge transfer, local capacity development and strong institutions, ensuring that Nigeria is equipped not only to deploy advanced technologies but to continually strengthen and develop them over time”, she said.

Laadel added that the platform effectively replaces extensive field inspections with AI-powered digital analysis capable of reading agricultural data remotely.

Demonstrating the technology, Ground Truth Analytics Chief Executive Officer, Driss Kitane, said artificial intelligence automatically identifies every farm parcel from satellite imagery, determines the crop being cultivated and tracks its growth stages without human intervention.

“Every parcel you see here has been delineated by artificial intelligence; nobody manually drew them. We can do this at massive, country and even continental scales. The images refresh every five days. We can cover all seasons and also observe the growth stage of each crop”, he said.

Kitane disclosed that the same technology currently predicts Morocco’s national wheat harvest up to three months before harvest with between 90 and 95 per cent accuracy. 

He added that banks already use the platform for agricultural credit assessments, while farming cooperatives in Ghana employ it to verify that loan beneficiaries cultivate the land they declare.

Addressing concerns over data security, he assured that all data generated under the project would remain under Nigeria’s control.

“Everything we develop is sovereign to Nigeria. It will be hosted on Nigerian servers. All sensitive data stays on those servers, and no one can access that data unless Nigeria decides so”, he said.

He outlined a three-stage implementation strategy beginning with a minimum viable product in one state, followed by expansion to three states with comprehensive crop intelligence and land-cover mapping across 15 states before full multi-season monitoring throughout the priority areas.

President of Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, Hicham El Habti, who received the Nigerian delegation, highlighted the institution’s growing academic relationship with Nigeria, disclosing that Nigerians account for about 60 per cent of students in its now fully English-language medical school.

The Nigerian delegation included officials from the Office of the Vice President, the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, the Federal Ministry of Justice, the National Space Research and Development Agency, the Nigeria Governors’ Forum and other agencies involved in implementing the National Agro-Productivity System.