Food System Resilience and Agricultural Value Chain Disruption: Evidence from COVID-19 Impacts Across Nigerian States

The COVID-19 pandemic constituted an unprecedented systemic shock to food systems globally, disrupting supply chains, agricultural labour markets, food distribution networks, and household purchasing power simultaneously. In Nigeria, the interaction of pandemic restrictions with pre-existing food system vulnerabilities revealed critical weaknesses in agricultural value chain resilience across geopolitical zones. This dissertation develops a food system resilience analytical framework and applies it to assess the differential impacts of COVID-19 on agricultural value chains and farmer welfare across Nigeria. The framework integrates supply chain management, complex systems, and food security analytical traditions to operationalise resilience as the capacity to absorb, adapt, and transform in response to shocks. Primary panel data were collected before and during the pandemic from 500 farm households and 120 value chain enterprises across six states representing all geopolitical zones. Difference-in-differences estimation exploits variation in lockdown policy stringency across states to identify pandemic impacts on value chain performance and household outcomes. Results indicate that value chains dependent on urban wholesale markets and long-distance transport suffered the greatest disruption, with farmer revenue losses averaging 38 percent in the highest-stringency states. Short food supply chains with direct producer-consumer links demonstrated higher resilience, recovering 70 percent of lost revenues within two months of restriction relaxation. The study makes theoretical contributions by formalising the resilience-vulnerability trade-off in agricultural value chain design and provides an evidence base for policies strengthening Nigerian food system resilience to future systemic shocks. Keywords: food system resilience, COVID-19, agricultural value chain, supply chain disruption, Nigeria