• Thursday, March 28, 2024
businessday logo

BusinessDay

Our feeding habits

Nigeria rice production v consumption

In the countries that we like to hail as saner climes, the obsession is to ensure that food costs are kept low so that the vast majority of the population can afford it. In Nigeria, we are constantly told, from a position of arrogance, that we should “tighten our belts”, or “change our mindsets”.

In August this year, my organisation, SBM Intelligence, published a report that was born out of our monthly food price collection. In collating our quarterly Jollof Index data, we have found that the majority of Nigerians spend a high percentage of their income on food, so in July 2019, we tested this out in a survey that took us to Ibadan, Suleja, Abuja, Kaduna, Kano, Jos, Makurdi, Port Harcourt, Owerri, Onitsha, Warri, Benin City and Lagos.

This survey’s result suggested that 63 percent of Nigerians spend all of their income on food. Only 7 percent of our respondents earn more than ₦120,000 per month, while the results suggested that ₦60,000 per month was the cut-off point for discretionary income. Earn below that, and you’d have nothing to spend after eating. Only 37 percent of our respondents earned ₦60,000 or more.

Just after its independence in the early 1960s Nigeria was self-sufficient with regards to rice. In that decade, annual production and consumption numbers were generally between 230 and 280K metric tonnes (MT).

By 1979 with the increase in population to 79 million people from 54 million a decade earlier, consumption had risen to 845K MT per annum, whilst production numbers had fallen behind at 370K MT.

Why did Nigerian eating habits begin to shift in this period? The shift towards rice began in the big cities as people got busier and had less time to prepare heavier meals like yam or cassava. There are simply faster options to eat your rice with than yams. This is the same reason why noodles have gotten really popular.

Then there is practicality. In general terms grain lasts longer in the store than tubers. This makes rice cheaper in the long run and better for when it’s not in season.

Then there is infrastructure. In all of this talk we still pretend not to know that storing farm produce in Nigeria is extremely tough, and getting them to the cities from the farms is even tougher. The losses make for grim reading. Nigeria’s total grain storage capacity (both public and private) is estimated at 1.1 million MT, while total production of grain (rice, maize, wheat, sorghum, etc) is estimated at around 23-25 million MT. This means that Nigeria has the capacity to store less than 5 percent of its total annual grain production.

Additionally, post-harvest losses of farm produce range anywhere from 20 percent to 52 percent of crops, due to factors ranging from poor transportation infrastructure to poor storage infrastructure. Indeed, the highest proportion of losses occur during market-oriented storage. Compare this to Brazil, which has a total storage capacity of 169 million MT, and the European Union, which has a grain storage capacity of around 360 million MT, and is also one of the biggest exporters of grain in the world. The EU’s agricultural policy was once criticised for producing mountains of grain and rivers of milk and wine, only for these surpluses to come in extremely handy during the 2009 financial crisis as the EU was able to lean heavily on its reserves in order to keep food prices low. Nigeria, by contrast, is caught in a double pincer of underproduction on one side and grossly inadequate storage infrastructure the other, which then lead to huge post-harvest losses, and then require high levels of import in order to meet local demand.

Over time, starting from Operation Feed the Nation, there have been attempts, at least on paper, to boost rice production. With the boost from various agriculture initiatives in the late 1970s to early 1980s, production grew to almost 2,000KMT by 1990, just shy of the consumption numbers.

Unfortunately, production barely increased in the 1990s while the consumption rate continued to grow at the back of increased population growth.

By 2011, consumption volumes had almost doubled production at 4,800K MT and 2906K MT respectively.

Then came the aggressive initiatives by the Jonathan administration between 2011 and 2015 and subsequently by the Buhari administration post-2015 which has led to the highest production values ever at 4,900K MT. However, this is yet to catch up with consumption which is presently estimated at 7,300K MT, a deficit of 2,400K MT. In fact, going by storage capacity and post-harvest losses, it can be strongly argued that the focus of the government should be on infrastructure and not production. After all, even if Nigeria eventually produces enough rice to meet local demand, the inability to properly transport and store the said production means that it will be a wasted effort.

Back to the survey, I talked about earlier, and the biggest concerns for Nigerians with discretionary income appear to be to keep connected either via phone calls or on the internet, and clothing, 10 percent of respondents falling into each of those categories. Perhaps reflecting Nigeria’s housing shortage, only 2 percent of our respondents said that they spend their discretionary income on rent. It is more likely, however, that most Nigerians do not cater to rent from their monthly income and usually find other sources that will yield sizeable lump sums, either by borrowing or by looking for alternative income sources asides from their primary source to deal with rent and school fees.

Nigeria’s population is presently estimated at 200 million and rising at a rate of more than 3 percent. Rice production rate has been rising at less than 3 percent. Like the growth of the overall economy, the rice production growth rate needs to outstrip the population growth rate by 2:1 for up to a decade if Nigeria is to again become self-sufficient in rice production. Failing to do this, and urgently, would push more people into the range where they have no discretionary income to spend. The government’s policies ought to be geared towards raising the standards of living, not pushing more people into poverty.

 

CHETA NWANZE