I’m genuinely worried about Nigeria. The country is trapped in a cycle of bad policy because its political economy is so distorted and painful to reform.
Let’s start with agriculture. Nigeria has five times more arable land than Vietnam, yet Vietnam produces five times more rice (and Nigerians love rice!). The problem isn’t the soil or the climate. It’s the institutional rot surrounding land tenure, which makes farming insecure, unproductive and unrewarding.
Land rights in Nigeria are among the weakest in the developing world. Most land is still governed by customary law, where chiefs or family heads are custodians rather than individuals with formal deeds. The result is a tangled mix of statutory(normal common law), customary (chief law), and (in the North) Islamic law, often overlapping and contradicting one another. Ownership disputes can take years to resolve. Without clear titles, farmers can’t use land as collateral to obtain credit or invest in machinery, irrigation, or fertilizers.
Even worse... The dysfunction varies by region:
Yorubaland (Southwest): Land is family-owned (“Omo Onile,” or son of the soil). Any sale or lease requires the consent of multiple relatives, slowing transactions and breeding extortion. In Lagos, Omo Onile groups often sell the same parcel multiple times.
Igboland (Southeast): Land belongs to the extended family. Individuals have only rights of use, not ownership. That discourages long-term investment and prevents land from being used as collateral.
Edoland (South-South): Chiefs and palace authorities hold land “in trust” for the community but increasingly lease it out for personal gain, creating corruption and displacement.
Northern Nigeria: Land allocation under customary and Islamic law is informal and based on the goodwill of emirs. Farmers can cultivate plots for generations without formal titles, leaving them vulnerable and limiting access to bank credit.
Middle Belt: The Jukun areas are especially volatile because overlapping ethnic claims and weak documentation invite manipulation by local politicians, who can “reallocate” land to their supporters under the guise of resettlement or development.
You see how fragmented this is? Unlike East Asia which had issues with massive tenant farmers serving a few landlords, where all you had to do was land reform. Nigeria's land problem is fragmented authority, weak institutions, and overlapping legal systems. That uncertainty keeps agriculture stagnant and deters modernization.
No one can fix Nigeria's land tenure because of the political economy (current actors benefitting from the status quo).
1. Chiefs, local officials, and political elites make money from the opacity through land sales and etc. Formalizing titles would reduce their leverage.
2. There's a Federal State Power struggle. Post 1978, land is in control of state governors, giving them discretionary power to allocate land. It's a political goldmine that governors would never give away.
3. Some rural communities trust their chiefs more than the state. So a politician would be more favored by defending local customs to secure votes instead of pushing for formal titling.
As the book How Asia Works notes, successful industrializers began by fixing agriculture. Nigeria isn’t even there yet. I write a lot about Nigerian history here if anyone cares.
Excellent comment Yaw. The many disadvantages of informal property rights that you describe reminds me of Hernando de Soto's 2000 book The Mystery of Capital. I am surprised that there hasn't been more effort made to establish charter cities or SEZ's in Nigeria and the other countries that are the focus of this article. Maybe there have been efforts and I'm just not aware of them.
Establishing a special economic zone certainly seems easier than transforming the entire country of Nigeria. And it would allow for some sort of joint control with developed nations to limit corruption / rent extraction from the state government while also ensuring fidelity to the rules of the zone.
I would be interested in Noah Smith's opinion of the potential for special economic zones to positively impact the future of these growing, poor, and currently ungovernable nations
Cassava is Nigeria’s most cultivated crop because it grows almost anywhere, even on poor soils and small plots. It doesn’t require irrigation or fertilizer. So farmers who don’t have access to credit or land titles can still grow it.
Rice, on the other hand, needs capital investment, irrigation, and stable land access, which are hard to get because of Nigeria’s weak land rights and credit system.
As a result, Nigeria is one of the world’s largest cassava producers (mostly for domestic consumption) but rice growing is an industrial policy of Nigeria because they want to grow more rice.
Nigeria did a national import ban of rice that they used to spent $2B in FX for. Now they are trying to grow rice but they still smuggle rice through Benin.
The perversity of the economy of Cotonou is something to behold. It's been a while since I was there, but the degree to which almost anything of any scale was more or less openly structured to serve industrial scale smuggling to Nigeria was - in some fashion impressive if depressing at the same time.
This is very sensible and I do know quite a bit about it. To the person who decried “white saviour complex”, I would respond that this is no more than the obligation on rich people to help those far poorer than themselves. What has that to do with skin colour? I worked at the World Bank as a senior economist in the 1970s. The big story is how unexpectedly well developing countries have done since then. My main focus was on India. I even wrote a book, published in 1982, arguing for radical trade liberalisation. Since that happened, as Noah writes, India has been transformed. I do not need to say anything about China. Of course, many Americans seem to hate the fact that these countries have become richer and so far more powerful. Tough! And can Pakistan follow? Of course, it can.
A bit unrelated, but about Pakistan: my personal experience was with my undergraduate thesis supervisor from CSIRO (the Australian science agency), he is Pakistani and did his bachelor there, worked there but ended up going to South Korea and US to do research in deepfake detection.
When we met his PhD supervisor in a conference, he said to my supervisor that "why didn't you and your wife come back to Pakistan? The country needs someone like you". He just smiled when hearing the snipe!
Whoa! The FT’s chief econ columnist M W is a reader/subscriber of Noah’s substack! How cool is that? A friend whose perspective I respect pointed me to this substack a year or so ago, and I’ve enjoyed it so far. Here’s further evidence that my friend has good taste. (Sorry to make both Martin and Noah blush. I enjoy both M's and N's chart-filled columns. Haven't checked out your books yet.)
Noah is talking about global economic effects (as in e.g. mass migration), so hardly white saviour. He could be wrong in his analysis, but this isn't the least white saviourism.
Excellent... thanks for the pointer. I have been thinking quite a bit about this topic in another context... Indian Democracy... I think there are lot of similar lessons.
This is a great example of Noah’s excellent writing and neutral presentation. He’s teaching and communicating a LOT of info here. In my case, to a dummy tho someone who wants to know and is willing to learn. And I did! I usually do not understand charts & graphs AT ALL, but Noah’s are consistently about 75% clear to me. I have nothing to add, only a bunch of things to think on. I’m smarter having read it.
Kiss the bunnies for me, Noah. Keep writing and teaching!
One thing that will likely alter the ebb and flow of populations by 2100 is sea level rise. A Nature study claimed some 200 million people will live below projected high tides by then and an estimated 160 million more will face significant flooding. The bulk of those affected will be in low lying areas of China, India, Bangladesh and the USA. Such large displaced populations will impact human migration patterns in unpredictable ways and likely create conflict between stable and migratory populations.
The Nature article you state is https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z and it uses IPCC scenario RCP8.5 to claim 150 - 200 million people affected by tides. RCP 8.5 is an extremely improbable scenario with all renewable and nuclear energy being replaced by coal and global population growth and is no longer even remotely plausible. They also looked at RCP4.5 which is more likely (2 °C rise with 50 cm sea level rise) with only 50 million affected with 80% in Asia mostly in Bangladesh and China. A 50 cm rise can easily be handled with dikes and other adaptation, which will be easily built by that time if China and Bangladesh keep growing. Bangladesh has already reduced deaths from typhoon flooding significantly in the last half century just by building adequate infrastructure.
The problem with the RCPs is that they are not built up from different policy scenarios. With policy set P1 we get geophysical changes C1 and they (includig adaption with costs A1) with costs PC1 will have damages of D1. Then we run the model for P,C,A,PC, and D for 1, 2, 3, … n. Assuming different levels of C without linking C to policies and the costs of those policies is not very helpful.
Thanks. These are important caveats you’ve added. But we should be mindful also of estimates that incorporate Antarctic ice sheet dynamics indicating that sea level could rise 70-100 cm under RCP 4.5. Anyway, my main point was that even under the more modest estimates you prefer as likely, populations may be under pressure to migrate.
How reliable are these 75 year predictions really? That’s a long time in which all kinds of unforeseen things will happen. This infographic is from the UN extrapolating “trends in fertility, deaths, and migration”- you can often get very different outcomes by changing the details of how you do these extrapolations. I feel like this might be creating a false sense of certainty
So cutting foreign aid and levying tariffs simply increases population growth in the world's large, poor nations. Perhaps the US can't reverse both MAGA actions, but restoring free trade with them will also lower rising US consumer prices, which should appeal to voters.
Besides free trade (unilateral if necessary) the best thing aid could do is support policy reform -- land titles in Nigeria, water use in Pakistan, DRC?
DRC one has to suspect one needs to let the Central Government collapse. It's never functioned as anything other than a predator. Not in colonial days, not in Zaire days...
It probably makes more sense for DRC to break up into south, east and west center
Am I wrong to think this looks like an amazing opportunity for a developed country with an effective immigration policy? Just run the "brain drain" play and bring in the best and brightest from these countries - treat them like the junior leagues. And also let in the people to do the work that native citizens don't want to do, at the low end. Falling native population reduces the "overcrowding" risk.
Yes yes there are cultural and moral considerations that some might have, but in terms of raw efficacy is this not The Way?
I really like your writing but I feel like this article misses the point. One of the reasons MAGA became so popular was because Americans were tired of trying to keep other countries afloat. There's no plausible scenario where Republicans do anything about this (if anything they'd take a sadistic pleasure in watching from afar) and prioritizing these issues makes Democrats more unpopular.
Great start on what I hope is a series on global fertility! I’m curious about the influence of female labour participation on the rapidity of the demographic transition. China was very dependent on factory girls for its industrialization but India is getting growth without them? Bangladesh seems to need them in textiles. What could go wrong? Automation here could be very bad for this plan - clothes & food processing are a massive opportunity for robotics but have both proven difficult to do at scale. Is the middle income trap becoming cemented by tech?
Noah, the Visual Capitalist graphic that propels your argument is based on UN population projections. Last time I dug into these, they were simple extrapolations from old data that do not account for the strong reductions in fertility that accompany economic improvement, reductions that you later describe and discuss in some detail.
Wealthy countries shouldn't worry about poor countries until they have figured out how to stabilize their populations.
Wealthy countries are dying and poor countries are growing. Yet the wealthy countries believe they are in the position to be giving out help. It's hubris on the largest scale.
Another excellent piece. I spent almost a decade working on sustainable economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa as chairman of BOMA.NGO. My conclusion is that Africa lacks two things: women's rights over their fertility and energy. You cannot improve the standard of living without energy, and you cannot address poverty without reducing the number of people born into it.
The projections in here lead to one conclusion: war. You didn't mention that, with this population growth, comes a decline in the average age. If you are a 16-year-old male with no education, no job, and no hope of establishing an economically viable family, you are going to be one thing: pissed off.
I’m genuinely worried about Nigeria. The country is trapped in a cycle of bad policy because its political economy is so distorted and painful to reform.
Let’s start with agriculture. Nigeria has five times more arable land than Vietnam, yet Vietnam produces five times more rice (and Nigerians love rice!). The problem isn’t the soil or the climate. It’s the institutional rot surrounding land tenure, which makes farming insecure, unproductive and unrewarding.
Land rights in Nigeria are among the weakest in the developing world. Most land is still governed by customary law, where chiefs or family heads are custodians rather than individuals with formal deeds. The result is a tangled mix of statutory(normal common law), customary (chief law), and (in the North) Islamic law, often overlapping and contradicting one another. Ownership disputes can take years to resolve. Without clear titles, farmers can’t use land as collateral to obtain credit or invest in machinery, irrigation, or fertilizers.
Even worse... The dysfunction varies by region:
Yorubaland (Southwest): Land is family-owned (“Omo Onile,” or son of the soil). Any sale or lease requires the consent of multiple relatives, slowing transactions and breeding extortion. In Lagos, Omo Onile groups often sell the same parcel multiple times.
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=125968#:~:text=The%20word%20“Omo-Onile”,dynamics%20and%20informal%20land%20governance
Igboland (Southeast): Land belongs to the extended family. Individuals have only rights of use, not ownership. That discourages long-term investment and prevents land from being used as collateral.
Edoland (South-South): Chiefs and palace authorities hold land “in trust” for the community but increasingly lease it out for personal gain, creating corruption and displacement.
Northern Nigeria: Land allocation under customary and Islamic law is informal and based on the goodwill of emirs. Farmers can cultivate plots for generations without formal titles, leaving them vulnerable and limiting access to bank credit.
Middle Belt: The Jukun areas are especially volatile because overlapping ethnic claims and weak documentation invite manipulation by local politicians, who can “reallocate” land to their supporters under the guise of resettlement or development.
You see how fragmented this is? Unlike East Asia which had issues with massive tenant farmers serving a few landlords, where all you had to do was land reform. Nigeria's land problem is fragmented authority, weak institutions, and overlapping legal systems. That uncertainty keeps agriculture stagnant and deters modernization.
No one can fix Nigeria's land tenure because of the political economy (current actors benefitting from the status quo).
1. Chiefs, local officials, and political elites make money from the opacity through land sales and etc. Formalizing titles would reduce their leverage.
2. There's a Federal State Power struggle. Post 1978, land is in control of state governors, giving them discretionary power to allocate land. It's a political goldmine that governors would never give away.
3. Some rural communities trust their chiefs more than the state. So a politician would be more favored by defending local customs to secure votes instead of pushing for formal titling.
As the book How Asia Works notes, successful industrializers began by fixing agriculture. Nigeria isn’t even there yet. I write a lot about Nigerian history here if anyone cares.
https://yawboadu.substack.com/p/the-remastered-economic-and-geopolitical?r=garki&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
Not as big a deal as land, but not allowing the private sector to sell/distribute fertilizer is another huge factor.
There's a reason that cadastral surveys and land reforms are so central to development in countries that have successfully industrialized!
Excellent comment Yaw. The many disadvantages of informal property rights that you describe reminds me of Hernando de Soto's 2000 book The Mystery of Capital. I am surprised that there hasn't been more effort made to establish charter cities or SEZ's in Nigeria and the other countries that are the focus of this article. Maybe there have been efforts and I'm just not aware of them.
Establishing a special economic zone certainly seems easier than transforming the entire country of Nigeria. And it would allow for some sort of joint control with developed nations to limit corruption / rent extraction from the state government while also ensuring fidelity to the rules of the zone.
I would be interested in Noah Smith's opinion of the potential for special economic zones to positively impact the future of these growing, poor, and currently ungovernable nations
Does that explain why even though Nigerians love rice, most of their cultivated crops are still cassava?
Cassava is Nigeria’s most cultivated crop because it grows almost anywhere, even on poor soils and small plots. It doesn’t require irrigation or fertilizer. So farmers who don’t have access to credit or land titles can still grow it.
Rice, on the other hand, needs capital investment, irrigation, and stable land access, which are hard to get because of Nigeria’s weak land rights and credit system.
As a result, Nigeria is one of the world’s largest cassava producers (mostly for domestic consumption) but rice growing is an industrial policy of Nigeria because they want to grow more rice.
Nigeria did a national import ban of rice that they used to spent $2B in FX for. Now they are trying to grow rice but they still smuggle rice through Benin.
The perversity of the economy of Cotonou is something to behold. It's been a while since I was there, but the degree to which almost anything of any scale was more or less openly structured to serve industrial scale smuggling to Nigeria was - in some fashion impressive if depressing at the same time.
This is very sensible and I do know quite a bit about it. To the person who decried “white saviour complex”, I would respond that this is no more than the obligation on rich people to help those far poorer than themselves. What has that to do with skin colour? I worked at the World Bank as a senior economist in the 1970s. The big story is how unexpectedly well developing countries have done since then. My main focus was on India. I even wrote a book, published in 1982, arguing for radical trade liberalisation. Since that happened, as Noah writes, India has been transformed. I do not need to say anything about China. Of course, many Americans seem to hate the fact that these countries have become richer and so far more powerful. Tough! And can Pakistan follow? Of course, it can.
A bit unrelated, but about Pakistan: my personal experience was with my undergraduate thesis supervisor from CSIRO (the Australian science agency), he is Pakistani and did his bachelor there, worked there but ended up going to South Korea and US to do research in deepfake detection.
When we met his PhD supervisor in a conference, he said to my supervisor that "why didn't you and your wife come back to Pakistan? The country needs someone like you". He just smiled when hearing the snipe!
Pakistan is a very complicated and essentially political story. But, interestingly, in the 1960s, Pakistan was thought to be doing better than India.
Whoa! The FT’s chief econ columnist M W is a reader/subscriber of Noah’s substack! How cool is that? A friend whose perspective I respect pointed me to this substack a year or so ago, and I’ve enjoyed it so far. Here’s further evidence that my friend has good taste. (Sorry to make both Martin and Noah blush. I enjoy both M's and N's chart-filled columns. Haven't checked out your books yet.)
> Americans seem to hate the fact that these countries have become richer and so far more powerful
Where do you get this nonsense from? We barely even think about any of these countries (except for China, of course).
Sounds a bit like white saviour complex. Other than trade I think the west should let them be.
Noah is talking about global economic effects (as in e.g. mass migration), so hardly white saviour. He could be wrong in his analysis, but this isn't the least white saviourism.
Good article ... I just wonder if governance issues can be solved externally at all. I wonder if there are any successful examples.
Also, it's actually hard to either bring institutions directly from rich countries, or asking rich countries to solve governance issues: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-mexico-built-a-state/
Excellent... thanks for the pointer. I have been thinking quite a bit about this topic in another context... Indian Democracy... I think there are lot of similar lessons.
There is a book by an Oxford professor about this governance trap though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bottom_Billion
I think that Noah in this post just rehashed this book, with some changes for the current era.
This is a great example of Noah’s excellent writing and neutral presentation. He’s teaching and communicating a LOT of info here. In my case, to a dummy tho someone who wants to know and is willing to learn. And I did! I usually do not understand charts & graphs AT ALL, but Noah’s are consistently about 75% clear to me. I have nothing to add, only a bunch of things to think on. I’m smarter having read it.
Kiss the bunnies for me, Noah. Keep writing and teaching!
Wouldn’t automation reduce the importance of trade?
One thing that will likely alter the ebb and flow of populations by 2100 is sea level rise. A Nature study claimed some 200 million people will live below projected high tides by then and an estimated 160 million more will face significant flooding. The bulk of those affected will be in low lying areas of China, India, Bangladesh and the USA. Such large displaced populations will impact human migration patterns in unpredictable ways and likely create conflict between stable and migratory populations.
The Nature article you state is https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z and it uses IPCC scenario RCP8.5 to claim 150 - 200 million people affected by tides. RCP 8.5 is an extremely improbable scenario with all renewable and nuclear energy being replaced by coal and global population growth and is no longer even remotely plausible. They also looked at RCP4.5 which is more likely (2 °C rise with 50 cm sea level rise) with only 50 million affected with 80% in Asia mostly in Bangladesh and China. A 50 cm rise can easily be handled with dikes and other adaptation, which will be easily built by that time if China and Bangladesh keep growing. Bangladesh has already reduced deaths from typhoon flooding significantly in the last half century just by building adequate infrastructure.
The problem with the RCPs is that they are not built up from different policy scenarios. With policy set P1 we get geophysical changes C1 and they (includig adaption with costs A1) with costs PC1 will have damages of D1. Then we run the model for P,C,A,PC, and D for 1, 2, 3, … n. Assuming different levels of C without linking C to policies and the costs of those policies is not very helpful.
Thanks. These are important caveats you’ve added. But we should be mindful also of estimates that incorporate Antarctic ice sheet dynamics indicating that sea level could rise 70-100 cm under RCP 4.5. Anyway, my main point was that even under the more modest estimates you prefer as likely, populations may be under pressure to migrate.
How reliable are these 75 year predictions really? That’s a long time in which all kinds of unforeseen things will happen. This infographic is from the UN extrapolating “trends in fertility, deaths, and migration”- you can often get very different outcomes by changing the details of how you do these extrapolations. I feel like this might be creating a false sense of certainty
So cutting foreign aid and levying tariffs simply increases population growth in the world's large, poor nations. Perhaps the US can't reverse both MAGA actions, but restoring free trade with them will also lower rising US consumer prices, which should appeal to voters.
Besides free trade (unilateral if necessary) the best thing aid could do is support policy reform -- land titles in Nigeria, water use in Pakistan, DRC?
DRC one has to suspect one needs to let the Central Government collapse. It's never functioned as anything other than a predator. Not in colonial days, not in Zaire days...
It probably makes more sense for DRC to break up into south, east and west center
Am I wrong to think this looks like an amazing opportunity for a developed country with an effective immigration policy? Just run the "brain drain" play and bring in the best and brightest from these countries - treat them like the junior leagues. And also let in the people to do the work that native citizens don't want to do, at the low end. Falling native population reduces the "overcrowding" risk.
Yes yes there are cultural and moral considerations that some might have, but in terms of raw efficacy is this not The Way?
I really like your writing but I feel like this article misses the point. One of the reasons MAGA became so popular was because Americans were tired of trying to keep other countries afloat. There's no plausible scenario where Republicans do anything about this (if anything they'd take a sadistic pleasure in watching from afar) and prioritizing these issues makes Democrats more unpopular.
Great start on what I hope is a series on global fertility! I’m curious about the influence of female labour participation on the rapidity of the demographic transition. China was very dependent on factory girls for its industrialization but India is getting growth without them? Bangladesh seems to need them in textiles. What could go wrong? Automation here could be very bad for this plan - clothes & food processing are a massive opportunity for robotics but have both proven difficult to do at scale. Is the middle income trap becoming cemented by tech?
Noah, the Visual Capitalist graphic that propels your argument is based on UN population projections. Last time I dug into these, they were simple extrapolations from old data that do not account for the strong reductions in fertility that accompany economic improvement, reductions that you later describe and discuss in some detail.
Wealthy countries shouldn't worry about poor countries until they have figured out how to stabilize their populations.
Wealthy countries are dying and poor countries are growing. Yet the wealthy countries believe they are in the position to be giving out help. It's hubris on the largest scale.
Another excellent piece. I spent almost a decade working on sustainable economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa as chairman of BOMA.NGO. My conclusion is that Africa lacks two things: women's rights over their fertility and energy. You cannot improve the standard of living without energy, and you cannot address poverty without reducing the number of people born into it.
The projections in here lead to one conclusion: war. You didn't mention that, with this population growth, comes a decline in the average age. If you are a 16-year-old male with no education, no job, and no hope of establishing an economically viable family, you are going to be one thing: pissed off.