Groundnut

Groundnut is grown across the savannah belt of the north-west and north-east, particularly in Kano, Katsina, Jigawa, Kaduna, Bauchi and Sokoto states, where the short rainy season and light soils suit it.

Groundnut had long been grown for food and oil. Export production expanded sharply after the railway reached Kano around 1911 during colonial rule, which made it possible to move bulk sacks to the coast. Buying stations, marketing boards and the stacked pyramids of sacks became fixtures of the northern trade from the 1930s through the 1960s. Export production collapsed in the 1970s: rosette disease outbreaks, drought in the Sahel and the shift of the wider economy towards oil all contributed.

Groundnut was historically the north's principal export earner and one of Nigeria's main sources of foreign exchange before oil. It is still widely grown for oil, food and animal feed, largely for the domestic market. No current figures are given here.

Groundnut cultivation in the drier savannah is exposed to erratic rainfall, and its expansion contributed to soil exhaustion and reduced fallow in the densely farmed Kano close-settled zone. Rosette disease and aflatoxin contamination in stored nuts have both affected farmers and trade. The collapse of the export trade in the 1970s removed a major income source from northern rural households.

The groundnut trade is bound up with the First Republic politics of the Northern Region, when marketing board revenue from the crop underwrote regional government spending in the same way cocoa did in the west.