The Bay States — Borno, Adamawa and Yobe — are using most of their 2026 budget to target agriculture, but more people are projected to suffer hunger crises before the middle of the year, FIJ can report.
This was disclosed in the BAY States status report published by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) on Friday.
The report disclosed that 4.8 million people are now facing crisis-level hunger or worse (CH Phase 3+) in the states. The report says that more than 600,000 are in emergency (CH4), famine-level hunger, across the three northeastern states.
Worse still, the report projected that by the peak of the lean season between June and September 2026, the number of people facing crisis or worse will rise to 5.8 million.
This will include a population of 930,000 in emergency conditions and 15,000 people in Catastrophe (CH5).
The report stated that only 1.3 per cent of the $224.4 million required for food assistance in 2026 has been funded. The consequences of this are widespread pipeline breaks and the cutting off of support to millions.
FUNDING IS HEAVILY RELIANT ON FOREIGN DONORS
According to the citizens’ budget versions of the BAY states, all three subnationals are spending the most on agriculture across almost all expenditure classifications.
Adamawa State, for instance, has allocated N3.064 billion to capital projects in the agric sector in the 2026 fiscal year. Borno State funded agriculture even better; the state allocated N42 billion to the sector in 2026. Yobe, the last BAY State, is planning to pour N17.49 billion into agriculture in 2026.
But these amounts barely scratch the surface. According to the report, humanitarian collaborations have pegged the amount required for food assistance across the three states at about $224.4 million. Out of these, only about 1.3 per cent of the funding has been released.
Most importantly, humanitarian food assistance funding in these BAY states is heavily dependent on foreign intervention. If the August 2025 humanitarian funding dashboard maintained by the UNOCHA is anything to go by, the top 10 donors for humanitarian food aid in the region are European countries.
Beyond food security, even in 2025, the UNOCHA had targeted 2.2 million Nigerians in needy situations with $19.6 million. By the end of the year, only 1.07 million people had been reached, according to the United Nations Country Based Pool Funds dashboard.
To further show the disparity between funding and demand, the report found that out of the 1.5 million people targeted for food assistance in 2026, only 35 per cent have been reached, all within Borno State. Adamawa and Yobe states have received no food assistance at all this year.
But even more significantly, FIJ observed that only 1.5 million people are targeted by the funding, which is barely enough out of a crisis population of 4.8 million people.
ARE THEY GOING TO MAKE IT?
The projections from the aid agencies are not positive. The UN, alongside the Relief Web, reported that food assistance pipelines are now on the verge of collapse.
They identified that the stocks depleted and funding flows nearly froze. Although a reprieve is expected through a six-month reserve allocation from the Nigeria Humanitarian Fund, with support from the United States, this intervention is limited in scope and timing. It also falls short of the scale required to stabilise the crisis.
Beyond the funding issues, conditions on the ground are worsening. Increased insecurity, particularly in Borno and Yobe, is stopping farmers from accessing food in their farmlands and causing a new batch of displaced people to seek aid.
There has been government intervention, says the report. The government has done a few things, like dry-season farming initiatives in Borno, grain releases and irrigation support in Adamawa and agricultural empowerment programmes in Yobe.
FIJ also found that Nigeria and its partners launched a $516 million distress fund to cater to humanitarian needs in the BAY states.
However, humanitarian actors say these measures remain insufficient against the scale of the crisis, especially because insecurity and rising costs keep undermining food production and access to food.
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