Panic wouldn’t help. Anger would make things worse. So, I stared out at the endless fields of northern Nigeria and thought, “I’m a pawn in their chess game. They were never rooks in mine.”
In 2014, I served as an embedded advisor to Nigeria’s minister of agriculture and rural affairs, tasked with building agricultural markets to support stabilization. I flew north with a plan to win over the former minister of agriculture — a powerful businessman who I thought was my rook in the game of market reform. But after landing in the northern city of Kano, my host met me with a smile and a borrowed police guard armed with a rifle. “You’re on my territory now, not the capital’s,” he laughed. He then informed me he had cancelled my hotel reservation and flight back to Abuja.
This was not exactly a threat, but the message was unambiguous. My work to rebuild markets was now secondary. My host wanted a pawn — a foreign mouthpiece to push his political agenda back at the U.S. Embassy and the World Bank. I wasn’t even a good pawn. I was just an early sacrifice in a political game I was only starting to understand.
I learned that being played had its advantages. Over the next week, I observed a new 110 percent rice import tariff take effect, imposed by the Nigerian president but not endorsed by my boss. The tariff rewarded those quickest to adapt beyond the law: smugglers, traffickers, and terrorists who already knew how to turn bad policy into good opportunity.
Tariffs, subsidies, and trade deals aren’t solutions to structural problems that make local markets uncompetitive. Rather, they’re bargaining chips in markets shaped by leverage, not economic principles. I came north to discuss rice and left with a crash course in shadow economies — the margins where real power plays out.
“Here, We Manage”
Nigeria’s favorable growing conditions should render it a net exporter of rice. However, in 2014, it ranked second globally in rice imports, behind only China. The tariff policy crafted in Abuja — and supported in Washington — imposed import tariffs to stimulate domestic production. The theory went that markets would naturally adjust and shield local growers from cheaper rice imports from India and Thailand.
On the third day of the trip, my host paraded me past one farcical corruption scheme after another. This included grain silos that had sat empty since the 1980s. Between our stops, with only two CDs for company — ABBA and a baffling Dutch folk-techno mix — I only cared about getting back to Abuja. Then I saw a man on a motorcycle drive out of the bush onto the main road, weighed down with three 50 kg bags of rice imprinted with Thai script, not Hausa — the dominant local language. I asked, “That rice isn’t local. Isn’t it too expensive with the tariff?” My host waved. “The tariff is an Abuja problem. Here, we manage.” At our next market stop, piles of empty rice bags from India lay beside freshly re-packaged rice marked “Made in Nigeria.”
Once my host was confident that I’d been won over to his agenda, he dropped the canned stump speeches and rambled about how the rice tariff had changed the smuggling business. Of course, he was also involved in a low-grade smuggling game himself. In Nigeria, some level of smuggling in the north isn’t uncommon. In any place where rules are selectively enforced and compliance costs exceed the cost of bribery, smuggling becomes a rational choice. Because my mission on the trip was not to research smuggling, it cost my host nothing to tell the truth.
On that trip, it became clear that a tariff can’t clear a field or fix a broken value chain. Despite protectionist policies to shield local farmers from low-cost imports, growing, milling, and shipping rice from India or Thailand to Lagos remained cheaper than producing it domestically. The Indian and Thai governments subsidize fertilizer and irrigation and guarantee low prices. In Nigeria, those costs fall on the producer. And Nigeria’s neighbors unsurprisingly responded. Benin dropped its rice import tariffs from 35 percent to 7 percent, and Cameroon reduced its tariffs from 10 percent to zero. Soon, warehouses in Cotonou and Douala became filled with rice bound for Nigeria.
It was never a fair fight. No tariff could overcome systemic challenges without decimating local economies.
After plenty of Star Lager on my last night, my host revealed another unsettling truth. “We are Nigerian businessmen. We find our ways. But now there are new men — militants from the north. If the militants keep making money smuggling rice, it will be trouble as these new men build here.”
At the time, “militant” was code for Boko Haram, the U.S.-designated terrorist organization. A few months later, Boko Haram militants kidnapped more than 250 schoolgirls from Chibok in Borno State, east of Kano. The operation garnered widespread international attention.
A notoriously adaptable organization, Boko Haram was capable of expanding operations quickly in new territory — I knew that much. But I hadn’t realized until that moment how tariff-distorted rice markets had turned a low-profit margin staple crop into a lucrative income stream. “Wait, now rice smuggling is funding Boko?” My host, who’d granted me a bit of respect over the past few days, tilted his head, confounded by my ignorance. “Why are you surprised? But now drivers want danger pay. The border guards keep changing their prices for bribes for us, legitimate businessmen.”
Of course, an organization like Boko Haram would exploit whatever the system handed them — power vacuums, margins, neglected roads — where others might only see dysfunction. Criminal organizations see cash flow.
Eventually, I was allowed to return to Abuja after several staged photos of me holding a bag of “local” rice, clearly repackaged, smuggled stock.
When I landed in the capital, I didn’t narrate my host’s script as promised. I did, however, report what I learned about Boko Haram — information obvious in the field but wildly illuminating in the capital. A week later, my report added urgency to growing complaints about the unintended effects of the rice tariff.
The agriculture minister soon called a press conference to announce several policy changes. The tariff on imported rice would be reduced from 110 percent to 30 percent. A new quota system would be developed for importers that invested in local production. Dropping the tariff to 30 percent narrowed the price gap enough that smuggling lost its pricing advantage over cheap, legal imports. The government shifted policies which ultimately left local producers struggling without enough support to expanding production capacity — channeling private sector financing into training and delivering improved seed and fertilizer.
Rice, Smugglers, Terrorists, and the Real Cost of Economic Protectionism
In 2025, as the Trump administration doubles down on tariffs without broader reforms, I find myself thinking back to that dusty, eye-opening trip to Kano — where experience taught me what no white paper ever has about the limits of protectionism.
Of course, the U.S. and Nigerian economies differ greatly. The United States has a capital-rich economy with relatively stable institutions. By contrast, Nigeria’s economy is less developed and has weak institutions. Yet both countries rely on imports to sustain key sectors and keep prices stable — whether for food, fuel, or manufactured goods. Just as President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria imposed steep rice tariffs against expert advice, President Trump has done the same — prioritizing political optics over economic counsel.
After working across more than 40 countries experiencing varying degrees of economic turmoil and amid political tensions, I’ve seen consistent patterns in how both formal and informal markets respond to pressure, policy, and profit. Nigeria has the arable land and demand to export rice, but not the infrastructure or policy consistency to compete globally. In a similar vein, the United States has the capital and technology to revive manufacturing, but not the labor cost advantage or tolerance for the higher consumer prices and disruption needed to become globally competitive.
The current U.S. administration’s policy aspirations discount the realities of labor markets, capital efficiency, and decades of industrial disinvestment. America didn’t just offshore production. It has evolved into a service-based economy, which values scale over proximity. Tariffs alone won’t reverse that. You can’t rebuild industry with nostalgia and heavy-handed, erratic policies that disrupt how the U.S. economy is currently structured. And illicit actors at the margins of the licit economy are no unwitting pawns.
When political theater introduces new chaos in markets, the most adaptable players profit first. Actors with business models unbound by policy coherence or institutional reform are built to thrive in environments with little legal accountability. Transnational criminal organizations and terrorists fit that profile. Then, unsurprisingly, goods including fentanyl find new, easier transit pathways tucked in with legal imports that are seemingly innocuous, like cheap tube socks and TVs in high demand.
The image of the man on the motorcycle emerging from the bush and carrying bags of cheap Thai rice lingers — dodging tariffs and the wishful thinking that enables them. Tariffs alone do not magically revitalize markets unless they are accompanied by sustained structural reforms. They can, however, create markets — just not the ones that policymakers intend.
Melissa Lloyd spent over 15 years on the ground advising, planning, and implementing security efforts in support of U.S. foreign policy and interagency operations across multiple combatant commands. Her current writing and research engage leaders of semi-autonomous regions navigating the friction between policy and reality.
Image: Chukwukajustice via Wikimedia Commons
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