What a Season of Yam Prices in Benue Actually Shows

Every year around this time, someone in a Makurdi market stall tells us the yam price is "up again," and every year the number they mean is slightly different from the one their neighbour quotes. Over one growing season we tried to settle the question the plain way: by visiting the same three markets on the same weeks and writing down exactly what a tuber sold for, who told us, and when.

The pattern that emerged wasn't dramatic, but it was clearer than the market gossip suggested. Prices held fairly steady through planting and the early growing months, when last season's stored tubers were still moving through the system. The real shift came in the six weeks before harvest, when stored stock ran thin and new tubers hadn't yet reached the stalls in volume.

Reading the record cards, not just the average

A simple average across the season hides more than it reveals. Two of our three markets showed a similar curve, rising steadily as the lean weeks approached. The third, a smaller market closer to a processing cluster, barely moved at all, likely because a handful of buyers there had already contracted supply ahead of time. Without the record card noting which market, which week, and which trader gave us the figure, that difference would have vanished into a single misleading number.

"I don't mind that the price moves. I mind when nobody can tell me why it moved, or where the number even came from."

That sentiment, offered by a trader we spoke with mid-season, is close to the reason this kind of recording matters in the first place. A price without a source is just a rumour with a naira sign in front of it.

What the lean-season rise means for buyers

For cooperatives and larger buyers, the practical takeaway is timing. Purchases made in the weeks immediately before the lean period consistently paid a premium over the same commodity bought six to eight weeks earlier, even accounting for storage costs. That's not a new insight to anyone who has farmed yam for a living, but seeing it laid out with dated, sourced figures gives the pattern something firmer to lean on than memory.

We're continuing to record through the next planting cycle, and we'll be watching whether this season's shift in fertiliser costs shows up in the price curve the way rainfall timing usually does. The record cards will tell us either way.