2022: Events that disrupted Nigeria’s food security

The outgoing year has been marked by several lows for Nigeria’s agricultural sector.

With full post-lockdown reopenings in 2022, expectations had mounted concerning what the year had in store for the country’s smallholder farmers.

The year had promised a bumper harvest for farmers who started to see rainfall as early as February.

However, farmers’ hopes were dashed in late February by several devastating factors, and the year will remain for many one of the worst.

“It has been a very challenging year for farmers. Our food systems have been under tremendous stress and pressure since the beginning of the year,” Ibrahim Kabiru, national president of the All Farmers Association of Nigeria, said in response to questions.

“This is owing to several challenges such as the Ukraine invasion, floods, surge in input costs, and worsening insecurity. These issues made farmers struggle all through the year,” Kabiru said.

The pressure on the food system further worsened Nigeria’s food insecurity position, which is already a critical issue.

In a 2022 combined report by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), World Food Programme (WFP) and the United Nations, Nigeria is listed among five other countries as the ‘hotspot of global hunger’ – where people are facing catastrophic levels of hunger.

FAO, in a separate report in April, said 19.4 million Nigerians were food insecure, and malnutrition rates in most northern states had more than doubled.

BusinessDay takes a look at the issues, in no particular order:

The Russia-Ukraine war

The first storm that hit farmers was Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022.

The war, which is now in its eleventh month, disrupted the global supply chain and cut off shipments from the Black Sea region that accounts for 30 percent of the major grain trade and at least 12 percent of food calories traded. The global fertiliser trade was disrupted and prices have continued to surge.

As a result, Nigeria’s fertiliser prices tripled within the period as farmers scrambled for the commodity owing to the shortfall.

The average price of a 50kg bag of NPK fertiliser – mostly used by Nigerian smallholder farmers – surged by an average of 275 percent in 2022 to N30,000 from N8,000 in 2021, according to BusinessDay findings.

The country’s dependence on imported goods from refined petroleum products to fertilisers and food, especially wheat, pushed up the cost of living for millions of Nigerians.

In the last 12 months, prices of everyday meals like bread, spaghetti, noodles, pastries, and biscuits that are made from wheat-based derivatives have climbed to unprecedented heights as the crisis disrupts global food supplies.

The war further exposed the country’s inability to make its food systems resilient to withstand shocks, as it made Nigerians pay for a war they are not directly part of.

Nigeria’s battered economy made it difficult for the country to mitigate the impact of accelerating inflation that comes with pressure piled from the Russia-Ukraine war.

Climate change

From the devastating flood in Nigeria to the historic droughts in the horn of Africa, climate change’s impact on communities is increasing and smallholder farmers are struggling to cope.

While no country is immune to the impacts of climate change, Nigeria is among the countries that are most vulnerable and least able to cope with the impacts of changing climate.

The Nigerian 2022 flood experience is the worst on record, according to the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development.

The country’s farmers association says about 90 percent of farms were destroyed by flood incidents in major crop-producing states, thus leading to crop production shortfall.

“The flood incidents we suffered in October impacted almost 90 percent of farmlands in about 30 states and many farmers are still yet to recover,” Kabiru said.

The shortfall caused a rapid climb in the prices of food prices, with inflation hitting 21.47 percent in November, a 17-year high.

Read also: How transport, food prices swelled Nigerians’ cost of living in November

Surging input costs

Prices of key inputs such as seeds, herbicides, pesticides, fertilisers, and agro machinery have doubled in 2022 and are still surging.

The surge in prices of key inputs is making it increasingly hard for farmers to expand their production areas and for Nigerian households to buy tomatoes, rice, beans, and other staple foods across the country.

The average prices of all staple foods across major cities in the country have surged by over 100 percent in the last year and are not in any way showing signs of slowing down, causing food inflation to hit 24.13 percent in November, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics.

Worsening insecurity

Farmers in Africa’s biggest economy have constantly called on the government to address issues of terrorism, banditry, and herdsmen attacks across the country as well as armed robbery and kidnapping that have constantly put farmers and their investments in peril.

Since the security situation became intense a few years ago, many farmers have fled Adamawa, Borno, and Yobe states, and thousands of agribusinesses have been destroyed after the destruction of their factories.

The worsening insecurity situation has slowed growth in the agricultural sector since the third quarter of 2016. Nigeria’s agricultural sector in the third quarter of 2022 grew by 1.34 percent year-on-year in real terms.

The situation adversely impacted food production in 2022 and led to a surge in imports. The country’s agricultural imports increased in value to N512 billion in the third quarter of 2022 from N464 billion in the second quarter of 2022.