The Federal Government’s optimism that Nigeria’s economy will return to positive growth by the first quarter of 2021 seems increasingly unrealistic on concerns of poor macroeconomic outlook and worsening insecurity, as farmers continue to get killed, particularly around the food belt region of the country, with a resultant spike in food prices.
Zainab Ahmed, minister of finance, budget and national planning had at the just concluded 26th Nigerian Economic Summit expressed government’s determination to ensure that the troubled economy bounces back from recession after it contracted for the second consecutive quarter by 3.62 percent in the third quarter of 2020.
But analysts have painted a picture of an economy that may not quickly rebound as the incessant killing of farmers will see low production, heighten inflation and put additional pressure on the already struggling economy.
According to Afioluwa Magaji, founder Agribusiness NG and executive director of X-ray Farms Consulting, “What we will witness going forward is a case of more farmers abandoning their farmlands. Children whose parents are farmers would resist their parents going to the farm. We have challenges of climate change already and insecurity has compounded the problems. We should be having more security personnel wherever we’ve aggregation of farm settlement.”
Read also: Nigeria’s low farm yields, changing climate heighten fears of food insecurity
He added that: “We had the protests, we had the climate change, we had the lockdown and this year has not been favourable to farmers. Needless to say, food prices have increased, food security is not assured. However, we may need to be flexible with our borders, because we don’t have storage and we have challenges with production.”
Magaji further said: “We need to convert a lot of waste to useful production, the border needs to be reopened with some clauses, which means flexibility in terms of what can come in or not.”
Apart from insecurity, industry experts are also worried that Nigerian farmers are still being constrained as regards improving production capacity and yields.
“For instance, the average acreage for a smallholder farmer in Nigeria is 1.5 hectares. This is a major concern where mechanisation is near absent,” Celestine Okeke, a small and medium enterprise development expert, and associate director, British Department for International Development, told Businessday.
Okeke noted that the challenge of farmers sourcing the right input from the local authorities also put farmers and Nigeria’s ability to recover from the current recession in a precarious situation, urging the government to ensure that its sectoral policies address these concerns.
“We really need to be clear on what sectors we want to develop and how we want to go about it. For instance, what is our sectoral policy on mining, trade, agriculture and how are we following it even with the structure of our budget and medium-term expenditure framework,” he said.
Nigeria also faced a major hurdle recovering fast from the recession, with President Muhammadu Buhari raising concern about the negative impact of Nigeria’s restriction to OPEC quota dictates of within 1.4 million barrels per day production.
