Months after the Federal Government declared a state of emergency on the country’s food insecurity status, there are no empirical evidences to show that the prices of sundry food items are stabilized or coming down anytime soon. Rather, food inflation rate is now about 40%, and as both the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) rightly predicted, some 25 million citizens are currently facing food insecurity challenge in the country.
The factors listed as responsible for the worsening situation include a mixed bag of economic, climatic and infrastructural deficits. On the one hand, there is the persisting issue of the hydra-headed insecurity affecting Borno, Adamawa and Yobe (BAY) states, which has kept several farmers away from their farmlands.
These states are said to have between 1.8 million to two million food-insecure children while about 700,000 of them are at the brink of death! Many concerned farmers in other states, such as Benue, Zamfara and Plateau, are still battling with fully armed herdsmen in the recurring crisis over ownership of farmlands.
On the other hand are the freaky climate change that causes extreme heat, leading to drought in some parts of the northern states and the flushing floods that have laid to waste fertile farmlands across many states in the country.
Solutions would come from sustainable sound economic policies, especially those that make agricultural practices attractive to the younger generation of Nigerians. The first step, however, is the urgent need to curb the menace of insecurity across the country in order to allow millions of displaced farmers to return to their farmlands.
Also important are policies that provide some inputs such as affordable high-yielding hybrid seedlings that are early maturing and disease-resistant. Apart from the supply of cheap, yet effective organic fertilizer, young graduates in related fields such as food technology and agricultural engineering should be employed as farm extension workers. As facilitators, they will teach the farmers much about modern agricultural practices. These could include biotechnology, tissue culture and genetically modified food practices to boost production.
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They should also assist to coordinate the farmers’ activities by forming farmers’ associations similar to what played out during the then President Goodluck Jonathan-led administration, when the Minister of Agriculture, Dr. Akinwunmi Adesina, brought up a similar policy. It was through such organisations that they had access to cheap fertilizer, to break the backbone of the fraudulent fertilizer merchants.
Given the current situation of high food inflation, the government should subsidize agriculture as Malaysia did for the rice farmers. What is also needed and urgently too is the provision of stable infrastructural development of good access roads and stable electric power supply.
The guarantee of stable electricity supply would assist in food storage, preservation and processing practices to be in line with international standard practices. That is another area where the critical role of the farm extension workers will make the desired positive impact.
Good access roads would mitigate the scourge of preventable food wastage that has risen from 25% to 40% over the past two decades. That is especially so at the farmlands, where several crops and raw farm produce are left to rot.
With all these in place, the farmlands would begin to attract investors not only from within the country but outside our shores. They would gradually grow to economic hubs, such that some of the locally produced food items become exportable to enhance our foreign exchange.
This will expand our Small and Medium Scale Enterprises, increase our Gross Domestic Product and boost food security, which will pull millions of Nigerians out of the pit of indigence.
