Agricultural Trade and Food Security in Nigeria: A Quantile Regression Analysis of Distributional Effects

Agricultural trade is mostly assumed to exhibit positive impact on food security. Most empirical studies of this relationship in Nigeria use Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression which estimates only average effect of agricultural trade on food security without taking cognisance of whether this relationship varies across the most food insecure and more food secure parts of the population. If agricultural trade is differential in its effects on food-security distribution, uniform trade-liberalisation policies could be poorly targeted – not enough for the food-insecure poor or even harmful for them. The effect of agricultural trade on food security in Nigeria (1981-2024) was assessed using quantile regression to capture the conditional effect of agricultural trade over five points of the distribution of food security (τ = 0.10,0.25,0.50,0.75,0.90) with a benchmark OLS baseline. The OLS baseline averagely suggests that agricultural trade is positively, though insignificantly, associated with food security, while agricultural output and income are positively and significantly associated with food security. The quantile regression results show strong distributional heterogeneity: agricultural trade has a strong positive impact at low-quantiles, where the bulk of the most food insecure groups are, but which decreases monotonically until it becomes negative at high-quantiles, whereas the impact of agricultural output shows the opposite pattern, increasing steadily from statistically insignificant at low-quantiles to highly significant at high-quantiles. Trade primarily serves as a means of managing food insecurity, but not as a means of further improving the food security. The paper calls for quantile-targeted instead of uniform agricultural trade and production policy.