PARAMILITARY INTERVENTION AND FOOD SECURITY: THE NSCDC AGRO RANGERS IN NIGERIA'S MIDDLE BELT

Arable farmer-herder violence in Nigeria's Middle Belt has moved well beyond the machete and stick disputes of earlier decades. Reports from Benue, Kaduna, Nasarawa, and Plateau States alone put the death toll above six thousand and the number of displaced persons above sixty-two thousand, and combatants on the herding side are now frequently armed with AK-47 rifles and, in some documented cases, anti-aircraft guns. It was against this backdrop that the Federal Government chose a paramilitary rather than a purely developmental or judicial response, folding the Agro Rangers Department into the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) in 2016 with a mandate to guard farmland and confront armed threats directly. This paper asks whether that choice, treating a resource and livelihood conflict as a matter for armed state force, has actually delivered food security gains in Kogi and Nasarawa States between 2014 and 2024, and at what cost to community trust. Using survey data from ninety respondents and key informant interviews across fifteen communities, the paper reads its findings through securitization theory, which explains why governments escalate an issue into an existential threat requiring extraordinary measures, and against the human security critique of that same move. The evidence shows real gains: most respondents report fewer clashes and a stronger sense that Arable farmers can safely return to their land. It also shows the costs of a militarized response: a third of respondents experience the Agro Rangers' presence as threatening rather than reassuring, and trust in the unit's neutrality is not universal. The paper concludes that paramilitary intervention has bought Kogi and Nasarawa a measure of physical security, but that food security in the fuller sense will depend on pairing that coercive capacity with land policy reform and community-based dialogue mechanisms that a security unit alone cannot provide