When Farmers Are Crying, the Country Is F*cked

There is a number that should stop you.

Over 52.7 million people across West and Central Africa are projected to struggle to feed themselves by mid-2025. Not in a war zone. Not in a famine. In a region that sits on some of the most fertile land on earth.

But this is not a natural disaster, this is something brewing in the farm. And, it starts at the farm.

The farmer feels it first

The price of food is more costly than freedom. Before cooking gas becomes unaffordable in Lagos, before tomatoes triple in price in Accra, before a pot of jollof rice becomes a luxury, a farmer somewhere in the region is feeling it first.

They can't afford fertiliser. Their seeds are substandard. The rains came wrong. Or they predicted it wrong. The government's intervention never arrived. And so there were no harvests, of they produced less. Charged more. Or stopped altogether.

In many African countries, households already spend more than 40% of their income on food. So, rising fertiliser prices feed directly into the cost of maize flour, bread, rice, cooking oil and other staples consumed daily across African households. When farmers struggle, everyone pays more. That is just basic philosophy and economics. Cause and effect.

The numbers nobody wants to say out loud

Nigeria has entered its worst cost-of-living crisis in nearly three decades. The cost of cooking one pot of jollof rice jumped 19% between September 2024 and March 2025 alone. There is a number that should stop you. Food insecurity in West Africa is at a critical juncture, with over 34.4 million people facing a severe food crisis. Economic disruptions including high inflation of up to 50%, trade barriers, and rising agricultural input costs are crippling livelihoods. Infact, PricewaterhouseCoopers warned that inflation combined with inadequate social protection could push up to 13 million Nigerians into poverty in 2025 alone. These are not statistics from a distant past. This is happening now.

The cooking gas problem is a farming problem

People talk about cooking gas prices as an energy issue. When it is also a food issue. Take for example, now that cooking gas is unaffordable, families switch to firewood and charcoal. That drives deforestation. Deforestation degrades the soil. Degraded soil produces less. Less production means higher food prices. Higher food prices mean more hunger. Everything is connected, it all starts at the farm.

The same pattern plays out with seeds. Subsidies in many countries are expensive, politically driven and poorly administered, often benefiting traders and middlemen more than productive smallholder farmers. Sound familiar? It should. We saw the exact same thing happen with Nigeria's ginger blight, where ₦1.6 billion in intervention funds were allocated, and the fungicides reached politicians instead of farmers.

What this has to do with shea, and with us

At Klear Shea, we work with unrefined shea butter. Shea comes from a tree. It grows wild. It does not need fertiliser the way food crops do. In many ways, it sits outside the worst of this crisis. But the women who harvest it don't. The producers we work with are smallholders. They live in the same communities being squeezed by rising food prices, expensive cooking gas, and seeds that cost three times what they did two years ago. When their cost of living rises, the economics of harvesting shea shift too. We cannot build a clean beauty brand on the back of a supply chain we do not understand. And understanding it means being honest about what is happening to the people inside it.

The uncomfortable truth

West Africa is not poor in resources. It is very rich in them.

What it is poor in is systems, systems that actually deliver on their promises, that get seeds to farmers, that protect crops from disease, that keep input costs from spiralling out of reach of the people doing the actual work of feeding a continent.

Africa needs long-term investment in local fertiliser manufacturing and regional supply chains capable of insulating farmers from global volatility. It needs smarter subsidy systems. It needs institutions that have a conscience, not just a loud mouth. Until that changes, the farmer will keep crying and we would go hungry. And the rest of us will keep paying for it - at the market, at the pump, and at the dinner table.

At Klear Shea, we believe the beauty industry cannot be separated from the agricultural systems that supply it. Follow us for more on raw materials, supply chains, and what it really means to build naturally in West Africa.