A while ago, a notable minister was quoted decrying the alleged level of hunger in Nigeria. How can there be hunger when you can eat a good meal for N30 in Kano, he said. I am paraphrasing but you get the gist. He based his belief in the absence of hunger in Nigeria on his questionable personal experience of buying food for cheap in Kano. You probably do not need me to tell you that is not a good way to determine the level of hunger.
The good way would be to try and systematically measure it. Luckily, we have a very good statistical agency that tries to measure such things. They recently released the fourth version of the living standards survey in collaboration with the world bank. I know what you are thinking. World Bank foreign data. But I want to assure you that these are not wild statistics. They are as credible as it gets and collected by our very citizens on the ground. There are many things in the survey but first we can examine the hunger question.
Spoiler alert. There is significant hunger in the land. On average across the country almost 37 percent of people surveyed reported that they worried about not having enough food to eat because of lack of money. Also, 44 percent reported that they were unable to eat healthy and nutritious food because of lack of money, and 27 percent reported that they had to skip a meal because of lack of money. If you imagine that as representative of the population then that is tens of millions of people who worry about how to eat. This is not a stable trend either.
Between the second wave of this survey and this present survey, which is the fourth wave, the number of households who reported having a food shortage increased from 11.1 percent in 2012/13, to 19.6 percent in 2015/16, and to 31.6 percent in 2018/19. A trend that should make even the most ardent policy makers nervous and a trend that demonstrates that these challenges are not a Jonathan or Buhari or APC or PDP thing, but a Nigeria thing.
The challenges with hunger in the country are at odds with our agriculture policy which has had the rather predictable consequences of increasing food prices. For example, according to the survey, the most consumed food substances are grains with over 97 percent of households reporting them as a major food source. The reliance on grains is more prevalent in the north where across the three northern geopolitical zones, over 99 percent of all households list grains as a major food source. These are the same regions with the highest levels of poverty by the way. You can therefore guess what effect our policies, such as those that ban or restrict their access to cheaper imported food, have on their bottom line. Talk about punishing those who really could do without being punished.
Another interesting observation is the seasonal variation in food shortages. In the south the reported food shortages are mostly stable all year round. In the north however the shortages vary based on the season with May, June, and July the worst months. I guess this is because by this time the harvest from the previous year’s farming season is exhausted, but the new harvest is not ready yet. From September and October, once the crops are harvested, food shortages drop drastically. From other research I learned that the variation in the harvest time as you move from the desert south to the end of the savannah is key to the region’s food security. It’s almost as if the same way cows move north to south and back to cope with the weather, food is harvested north to south also to cope with the weather. It makes me wonder what effect this border closure policy will have on food security in the region, and the disruption of the north south strategy. It looks like the ripples will be felt for some time.
Anyway, the moral of this story is that we actually have a lot of good data being collected and we need to start to use such data to think about our challenges and craft adequate solutions going forward. Also, there really is hunger in the land and apparently it is rising.
NONSO OBIKILI
Dr. Obikili is chief economist at BusinessDay
