- This is an emergency the government should tackle
WE are not entirely surprised by the separate findings by Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) that the average Nigerian household spends between 65-70 percent of their income on food. Aside bringing again to the fore, the cold reality of declining incomes among Nigerians as a result of the high cost of food and other household items over the last couple of years, the reports have somewhat validated other findings about what is generally known to be the intolerable rate of inflation, the record number of the population said to be living below the poverty line (currently estimated at 70 percent), and, the poor macro-economic policies and how these impinge on our agricultural production and output.
If it seems a rehash of the old tales about the failure of our agricultural practices, the finding particularly by the US agency that “limited government support to farmers over recent years, rising cost of farming inputs, and insecurity as limiting private efforts at increasing agricultural productivity” is no doubt, instructive.
That is however not all. The report fingers the devaluation of the naira for the decline in the purchasing power and consumption in general; the corollary of which is the upsurge in the demand for Nigerian grains in countries around the Sahel region by 40 percent – said to be the country’s highest agricultural export level over the last 15 years”– a development it sees as boding ill for the country’s food security. In the same vein, it came hard on the Federal Government for abandoning its strategic grains reserve policy due to paucity of funds just as it blames the development for “discouraging farmers from increasing production”. The report specifically notes that: “Farmers are also sustaining huge losses because the Government of Nigeria (GON) has stopped purchasing corn supplies for strategic reserves, and operators in the poultry sector, who are principal consumers, are either downsizing or closing operations”.
None of the issues highlighted in the report, we daresay is new. Many of them have not only been acknowledged by successive administrations, there have been some attempts to tackle them, albeit with limited success. However, aside being a call to action, to underscore the fierce urgency of the moment, it seems to us that there could not be a better opportunity than one presented by the current economic downturn to take a fresh look at the problems with a view to finding enduring solutions.
Again, the point is that the problems hampering our agriculture as indeed our quest for food security are by now well known. While the chief of the problem is the abysmally low productivity fostered by the adoption of poor technologies and the terribly inadequate infrastructure situation, the poor policies promoted by successive administrations have contributed in no small measure to creating the current situation of near total dependency on food imports. And, as Nigeria has only just experienced, a country that depends on imports for food merely sets its citizens up for the pang of hunger whenever there is turbulence in the macro-economy.
The real challenge therefore consists in redressing this imbalance through a holistic policy that offers the farmer all the support that he can get – fiscal, and infrastructural – to modernise farm practices and to make him competitive; to guarantee fair, equitable and indeed, competitive prices for farm products. This implies the government taking deliberate steps to protect the local farmer from the influx of foreign, often highly subsidised imports.
Above all, the government should lead in harnessing and bringing to par, the sector’s value chain for long term sustainability and to get local entrepreneurs to embrace more aggressively, the challenge of food processing.
