Danger of Food Insecurity In Nigeria

The just-concluded seminar that held in Abuja a fortnight ago on the question of food security for Nigerians could not have been timelier. There are many reasons why this is so, particularly as Nigerians remained relatively mute and docile when everyone else in Europe, the Americas and even in Africa, took to the streets protesting hunger or the threat of it. Among a team of international journalists from Africa and Asia in Germany at that time, strong debate ensued that CNN, which repeatedly gave extensive reportage to these incidents, might have been under the influence of those who opposed the use of any kind of food for biofuel.

That argument was supported by the fact that oil prices around the world reached a record-high of $130 per barrel between July and August. Moreover, since there were fears that it would eventually hit the $200 per barrel mark, nearly everyone got set on their marks in a race to be the first to provide an answer to the inflationary crude oil trend. Therefore, a-chicken-and-egg-which-should-come-first puzzle led to a situation where the world had to make a choice between providing energy from food or using food to produce energy.

While this kind of pseudo-speculation was going on, other people said that Nigerians did not protest the so-called food crisis because we always produced diverse kinds of foods in such a manner that if you took rice off the tables of most Nigerians, amala, tuwo, starch and garri would be reliable substitutes. They said that our food diversity is greatly complemented by relatively good weather makes it impossible for Nigerians to go hungry, ever. Nevertheless, we must tell ourselves the truth sometimes and insist that a place like Benue state, known as ‘food basket of the nation’, does not have that name simply because it feeds the nation or because the farmers have any unique farming techniques. It is because Nigeria is an endowed land. It is a land blessed by God. Nearly every plant that is plantable could grow and do well on Nigerian soil if we want it to.

Nevertheless, many questions arise about a people with this kind of blessedness and bountifulness but who still produce food at subsistent level. We must ask ourselves why we are yet to be the food basket first of Africa, and compete with people who do not have our kind of endowment, but who sell simple things like apples and watermelons to us. Why is this so? Why do we experience high cost of the foods that we produce here? Why must there be scarcity anytime we hear that Nigeria exports cassava to China?

Nigerians must know today that the answer does not lie in the large-scale importation and application of fertilizers on pieces of lands that really do not need fertilizers for improved yields. Nearly every year, cronies of government collect huge sums to import thousands of bags of fertilizers, yet there is still hunger in the land. The answer, again, is not the large-scale importation of rice. The attitude of government in the past was that, if there is a lot of money accruable from crude oil to import rice from Asia, then, why bother develop local rice farms in Umuahia and Abakaliki or Ekpoma? To import rice to meet the needs of our bludgeoning population is not a bad idea. However, there are certain factors we must consider. One, rice importation dealt the killer blow to the farms in Abakaliki and Ekpoma, and exposes our people to the uncertainties generated from rice importation and consumption. Presently, there are speculations that the rice imported into this country contains strains and grains suitable only for animal domestication and husbandry. Those who know about this, like Friends of the Earth International, FoEI, a worldwide Non-Governmental Organization has led a consistent crusade against Monsanto and other big corporations involved in genetically modifying the genes of crops for a bumper harvest. In laboratory tests, FoEI claims it has carried out on imported rice in Nigeria and Sierra Leone, FoEI alleges that some of the rice imported to both countries contains SI strains, fit only for animal husbandry.

The uncertainty generated from this problem makes it difficult to determine which rice to eat or not to eat in Nigeria. This is because 95 percent of what we eat is imported and that some of it is fit only for animal husbandry, no matter how lovely the rice looks. Among Nigerians, rice, garri, tuwo, or amala remain staples. While rice is dogged by the GMO controversy, garri too is having problems. Scientists at the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture, IITA, who claim that they have genetically modified the local variety of cassava, are reluctant to introduce this disease-resistant, already-yellow, high-yielding species because of fears by the public that genetically modified foods are not always safe to eat.

What all this means is that the international bar, and parameters for food production, have gone beyond subsistent and fertilizer methods. It means that food and cash crops are no longer being cultivated on large acres of land but also in state-of-the-art laboratories across Europe and America. Take for instance what happens at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop plant research, IPK, in Europe. Scientists there are able to replace weak rice genes with rat or cockroach genes. As soon as they do that, rice production reaches bumper levels. However, this rice does not always end up on their breakfast and dinner tables, but if will have to end up there, people are told about it and they make informed choices. But they feed a lot of those grains into state-of-the-art machines to produce biogas or fuel, while they export the remainder to countries like Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone. This may sound incredible but this is why organizations like Greenpeace International fights Monsanto day and night for these genetically modified foods to remain in the laboratories.

Because the science of biotechnology is at an infantile stage of development in Nigeria, our government must exhibit the kind of political will that sustains the Songhai agricultural farms in the Benin Republic. At a recent seminar, the proprietor told participants that ‘since the world no longer relies on natural resources but on a knowledge-based economy, agriculture should no longer be left in the hands of simple farmers but should involve entrepreneurs who have reasonable understanding of how to procure any set of goods and services corresponding to the needs of a group’. What all that plenty grammar means is that instead of government to dash oil money to its cronies via fertilizer and rice importation, the clever thing would be to throw that money at the development of research-based capacity building programmes. Government and banks must encourage farmers with subsidies, not the $700million recently announced for ‘agricultural development’. When German farmers realized there was a lot of money from contributing solar power from photovoltaic panels to the national grid, most abandoned their farms. Faced with an imminent crisis in its agricultural sector, the government responded by increasing the subsidies it gave, and this made food production very competitive. Can’t we at least start with giving serious-minded rice and cassava farmers the encouragement they need? For many countries of the world today that import only a tiny percentage of their food, that was the initial step they took to ensure food security for their peoples.