Unchecked insecurity in Nigeria is threatening food security and making it difficult to diversify the economy. Millions of Nigerians, mostly in the north, face acute food shortage. Farmlands across Nigeria are increasingly becoming battlefields due to kidnapping, bandit attacks and other violent clashes.
Smallholder farmers who brave the odds daily are uncertain if they will make it home alive. Some big farmers who have invested millions are weighing their options to abandon their farms, several others have suspended operations.
Farmers in Borno, where the threat of Boko Haram remains a clear and present danger, have relocated to the camps for internally displaced persons, while those in the villages live in fear and dare not venture to their farms. Over a week ago 17 farmers were killed on the same at three different locations. At the peak of the lean season last year, three million people in the three states most affected by Boko Haram insurgencies were reported to lack food
Marauding insurgents, bandits and kidnappers interrupt the farming season, make roads to farms unsafe and disrupt markets were farm produce are bought and sold. Consequently, it is estimated that 22.7 million Nigerians in the north are at risk of a food crisis if the state of insecurity worsens.
Ironically, the security situation in Nigeria is unlike that of Yemen, the Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Syria and South Sudan. Yet Nigeria is ranked along with them as countries expected to face the most severe food crises in 2019, according to the 2019 Global Report on Food Crises. The country was ranked among the top eight countries that saw many of its citizens go hungry last year. In 2018, 5.3 million Nigerians in 16 northern states experienced acute food crisis.
That millions are facing, and more will face, severe food shortage in a country with over 82 million hectares of arable land, a young and large population, a tropical climate and soil that supports vast array of crops is scary.
What is scarier is how insecurity and a food crisis are treated as unrelated challenges – a teeming unemployed and hungry youth population is a ready army of bandits, kidnappers and insurgents. Unemployment is churning idle hands at an alarming rate. It breeds insecurity. Insecurity is disrupting farming and discouraging investors.
Agriculture is seen as the one-way ticket to diversifying the economy. But insecurity is threatening this aspiration. If farmers, farmlands, roads and markets are unsafe the vast non-oil income expected from agriculture will remain just that, an expectation. It will make nonsense of all the incentives (and billions of naira) the central bank has laid out for the 10 commodities identified as potential foreign exchange earners and job generators.
After the first oil shock in 1973, President Richard Nixon announced plans to wean the US off foreign oil and declared energy independence a national security. This thinking informed the decision of who was appointed to head the military and became the preoccupation of every Secretary of State and Defense. The US began to see geopolitics through this lens. It spurred research and development in the ivory towers and in the oil industry. Until eventually, fracking – the technology that extracts oil trapped in shale formations – was invented and has made the US one of the largest oil producers in the world.
It is reckoned the impending food crisis may be a few months away. The looming food crisis can be averted but it requires a totally different approach to national security. And national security, as it is considered today in the country, is not about the President sleeping well at night.
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