About 9.8 million Nigerians were assessed to be in need of humanitarian assistance between October and December 2020 in the Crop Prospects and Food Situation report published last month.
The quarterly report by FAO’s Markets and Trade division indicated Africa’s most populous nation is among 45 countries, 34 of them in Africa, that continue to be in need of external assistance for food.
The cost of food has been increasing astronomically and farther out of reach for most people, with the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) data in November putting food inflation at 18.38 percent.
If Nigeria had an opportunity to demonstrate that efforts in boosting agricultural output and optimising the entire value chain for food security were working, then the year 2020 was no better time. Regardless how much COVID-19 affected human activities; one thing that was certain was that people had to keep feeding, no matter what.
The year of pandemic and economic disruptions however revealed the underbelly of a nation unprepared to feed its large (and rapidly growing) population. Primary production in agriculture was hit in every way; from input availability to accessibility of farms, getting labour at harvest and being able to sell final output. The entire production process became a nightmare with farmers reporting in some cases they lost crops on the fields, as they could not harvest them.
In May, Salim Muhammad, president, Wheat Farmers Association of Nigeria, said at the time that harvest of already mature crops was delayed as a result of restrictions on movement, gathering of people and the general lockdown.
For other farmers, they could not get seeds, fertilisers or other inputs to even farm in the first place. For livestock farmers such as poultry, getting day-old chicks to breed was a herculean task, and worse was getting feed for their animals. Some ended up incurring losses, others had to shut down and generally, loss was a dominant theme.
The decision to shut Nigeria’s land borders also became one in which the country had to hide its tail between its legs in reopening the borders, as it turned out the country was not self-sufficient as those in government had led themselves to believe.
While Nigeria’s borders were said to have been closed, “In actual fact, the smuggling continues. Most of the things smuggled in before did not come through the traditional borders; therefore, it was the wrong gate that was closed. When you go to town, you still find all imported chicken are available and many other things. How did they get here?” asked Emmanuel Ijewere, vice president, Nigeria Agribusiness Group (NABG) in a phone interview.
When the borders were shut to movement of goods in August 2019, a main objective was to boost local agricultural output by making farming more attractive and profitable for local farmers. A year and three months later, the country is battling acute food insufficiency, which appears to be even worse off than before the borders were closed.
The closure of the country’s border appeared to have been more of a physical activity without intellectual rigour to design how to boost local food production.
BusinessDay had also reported that Nigeria is treading at the brinks of a hunger crisis in the event of any severe disruptions to the country’s agricultural system. At the time of the report in August, Nigeria had only about 30,000 metric tons of grains in the strategic grains reserve, out of a capacity of 1.3 million metric tons, implying the country is grossly unprepared for any national emergency.
“What they have is a small quantity that is meaningless,” said an informed source who pleaded anonymity.
Divided by an estimated 100 million poor people (and not even the total population) would give a meagre 300 grams of a single type of grain, which would last only a few days. Whereas the food reserve ought to sustain the entire country if productivity was to be halted to nearly zero for a complete season or even two seasons.
At the beginning of the year, the assumption was that the country had about 100,000 metric tons before President Muhammadu Buhari granted approval to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development to release 70,000 metric tons of grains from the National Strategic Food Reserve stock as palliative following lockdowns occasioned by the coronavirus pandemic.
“How do we restock the food reserve and putting back more than what was there before?” asked Kabir Ibrahim, president, All Farmers Association of Nigeria (AFAN), in a phone interview.
“That is very germane, because if we go by what is happening now with the insecurity in the North West and parts of the North East, where food is produced, there might be some shortage.”
The food security situation in Nigeria calls for even more attention as 86.4 million people face moderate or severe food insecurity, according to the 2020 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, an annual flagship report jointly prepared by FAO, IFAD, UNICEF and WFP. This is apart from the 9.8 million referenced earlier.
While Ibrahim suggested government should be ready to buy excess produce at the point of harvest, the problem in all of this is; the country is relatively broke and cannot afford to stock up the direly needed reserves – a dilemma, even in the midst of acute need.
For months, food availability and affordability in Nigeria has become increasingly difficult due to a number of factors, but none of which negate the government’s lack of preparation to achieve lasting food security post-border closure.
“We certainly have not taken advantage of the border closure and this could never have been taken advantage of because of the disconnect that exists between government policy (and implementation),” said Ijewere.
Nigeria’s inability to feed itself was attributable to “Persisting conflict in northern areas,” according to the FAO report. For Nigeria, insecurity and threats to farming activities are an addition to the general disruptions caused by the pandemic. It also indicated over 2.7 million people are estimated to be internally displaced due to conflict in northeastern states of Adamawa, Borno and Yobe, communal clashes in North West/North Central zones and natural disasters. The areas inaccessible to humanitarian interventions are facing the worst food insecurity conditions.
However, the challenge of low productivity goes beyond insecurity in the northern production areas. All over the country, the absence of strategic, intelligence and policy-driven push to advance agricultural output has remained lacking.
