Nigeria’s dream of achieving food security is currently being threatened by worsening insecurity, flood and climate change crises.
At the forefront of Nigeria’s food insecurity crisis are banditry, kidnapping and farmers-herders clashes that have halved food production in recent years.
The agricultural sector has been under the weight of increasing death toll amongst the farming population especially in states like Benue, Nasarawa, Kaduna and other southwestern states.
Data shows that over 1,356 farmers have lost their lives between 2020 and the first quarter of 2024 to bandit attacks while on the premises of their farms. Some other farms have been set ablaze or destroyed by grazers who openly allow cattle graze on farms unsupervised.
In Benue alone, between January 2023 and February 2024, 19 local governments were deliberately attacked by bandits, killing and inflicting injuries on 690 farmers in the state.
“Nigeria had the largest increase in the number of people facing high levels of acute food insecurity, driven by record inflation and conflicts in the north,” the World Bank said in a recent report.
The World Bank notes that Nigeria’s food insecurity level in the first quarter of 2024 is worse than that of 2023.
Read also: FG pledges renewed efforts to combat food inflation through increased production
Corroborating reports by the World Bank that the number of malnourished children and women in Africa’s biggest nation increased significantly in 2024, especially among people in the north, the United Nations World Food Programme pins 4.4 million people to be food insecure in northeast Nigeria.
This is not far-fetched as a lot of food-belts states in the southwest, northeast and northcentral, major food-producing states – have been victims of banditry attacks in the last five years.
Although Nigeria’s food inflation has moderated for two consecutive months (July and August) due to the high base effect and the seasonal impact of the food harvest season, it remains elevated at 37.52 percent compared to pre-inflationary levels.
Similarly, Nigeria’s agricultural sector faced significant challenges in September from devastating floods that ravaged vulnerable communities raising food insecurity concerns in farming communities.
Heavy rainfall, compounded by poor drainage systems and rising river levels, has brought about the worst flooding the country has seen in years and is driving food insecurity.
Many farms have been eroded in the process. This is escalating food inflation which is highly dependent on the quantity and quality of food production.
Climate change also poses a big risk to farmers who complain about severe drought and insufficient rainfall, a situation that is cost-intensive and unaffordable for many who fall within the poverty index.
One farmer told BusinessDay that she had to depend on irrigation in the early months of the year because a lack of rainfall was posing great threat to her plant’s survival.
“Climate change is a big issue in the agric sector. The rains have not been falling like before, and this is making farmers depend on irrigation, which is expensive,” Chidinma Ezeh, team lead at FarmCAS, said in an earlier interview.
These situations, according to experts, are greatly squeezing food supply crises, pushing food prices beyond the reach of the average Nigerian who earns a minimum wage of N70,000, where about 65 percent is spent on food, a situation the UN describes as ‘unacceptable.’
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