In 8 years, there is a global objective to end hunger, achieve food security, improve nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture, but for Nigeria, several factors militate against achieving these.
Today, data shows 7 out of every 10 Nigerians are food insecure.
According to a 2021 report by Onyenekenwa Cyprian Eneh, titled ‘Nagging Food Insecurity Amidst Numerous Public Agricultural Policies, Strategies, Programmes and Projects in Nigeria: Identifying and Fixing the Key Issues’, there are six key issues that need to be fixed in order for Nigeria’s food insecurity to be tackled.
Eneh identified the issues as the predominance of smallholder subsistence farming, use of rudimentary tools, unimproved varieties of seeds and other inputs, traditional storage and preservation practices, the deficit of marketing infrastructure, and dependence on rain-fed agriculture.
Fixing these, according to his research findings, can address the four dimensions of food security – availability, access, utilization, and stability. The key issues were attributable to poor science technology and innovation (STI) than to other selected development sub-sectors, and can be fixed by STI adoption.
Therefore, STI adoption for agricultural production was recommended for the attainment of food security in Nigeria.
“People may do without clothing or shelter for as long as necessary, but not food,” the report said.
The spiralling prices of basic food items and the increased importation of some staple food into the country, on the back of an FX crisis, are indicative of a situation of food insecurity that should provoke the concern of not only governments but all segments of civil society.
The country has seen and in fact, welcomed hasty moves by the government in terms of disbursement of agricultural development funds in the form of loans to farmers to boost food production in the country, but these interventions are yet to address the country’s food crisis in a holistic and permanent manner.
In an interview with BusinessDay, Victor Olowe, a professor and agronomist at the Institute of Food Security, Environmental Resources and Agricultural Research, FUNAAB, also spoke along the lines of Enah’s research and findings.
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Olowe is of the opinion that if government intervention must be holistic, it must start from the bottom up. It must, according to him, address the primary producers, who are primarily the smallholder farmers; farmers that cultivate less than 5 hectares of land.
“The smallholders contribute about 80 percent of the food we eat. Definitely, they are major stakeholders in food security. So if you’re bringing in any interventions, you must factor their conditions into such intervention,” Olowe said.
He added that the basic needs of this category of farmers are inputs, seeds, fertilisers, agrochemicals, and these have to be made available to them. Olowe recalled when Akin Adesina, the former Nigerian agriculture minister, introduced the Growth Enhancement Scheme (GES) via the electronic wallet scheme (e-wallet); an electronic system that uses vouchers for the purchase and distribution of agricultural inputs.
Farmers who were eligible for these vouchers were to be 18 years of age and above, have their bio-data captured by the government, own a cell phone with a registered line, and have a minimum of N50 airtime on it. Hence, the government could track who got fertiliser, when they got it, and how much was paid.
Reports later had it that bags of fertilisers were diverted for personal gains and when supplied, they were either adulterated or underweight.
“Political farmers manipulated the scheme for their own gains. So, if any intervention in itself will be meaningful, it should be one that makes it easy for the real and actual farmers to have access to inputs,” said Olowe.
Other key elements that experts doted on are mechanisation, addressing insecurity, marketing and distribution, value addition in order to get more premium, and the environment. “If all these are put in place, then we are good to feed ourselves,” Olowe added.
Tajudeen Ibrahim, director of research and strategy at Chapel Hill Denham, noted that the country should have learned its lessons from the incidences bordering on insecurity that increasingly plagued the agriculture sector over the past 2 to 3 years. Money, he said, is not the only problem around food security, there are also key elements like security, infrastructure, storage facilities, transportation, etc.
“If the government cares for the sustainability of its goals, all these must be considered,” Ibrahim said.
On his part, Kabir Ibrahim, national president of the All Farmers Association of Nigeria, suggests that the federal government and all state governments work in unison “to support the smallholder farmers to build back better, ahead of 2023, by embracing all-year-round production, Climate Smart Agriculture, SCI (system of crop intensification), Agricultural Biotechnology, and GAP (Good Agricultural Practice)”.
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