Afolabi Gambari
According to the 1996 World Food Summit, food security is defined as a situation when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.
Food security stands on four pillars, namely availability, access, utilisation and stability. Therefore, strengthening food safety systems is critical to unlocking the economic potential of agricultural value chains for producers through enhanced market access and trade while increasing the availability of safe and nutritious foods for local consumers.
As recent as in June of 2022, the Food Safety Network (FSN) conducted an assessment of the food safety system in Nigeria to develop a roadmap for capacity-building under the Feed the Future Initiative (FFI). This assessment was prepared in response to Nigeria’s country action plan, which calls for investments in the food safety regulatory system to achieve food and nutritional security outcomes. The assessment included a literature review as well as in-person consultations with regulators across the government of Nigeria.
By far the local government in Nigeria has a huge role to play in ensuring food security for the country. Nonetheless, the role needs be highlighted for the benefit of this piece.
Urban food security is a major challenge that requires action at all levels, comprising global, national and local. However, as long as policy debates continue to focus only on production, the role local governments can play will remain limited. Without doubt, the priorities of the residents of low-income settlements highlight the importance of urban planning and infrastructure in ensuring access to safe food and suggest a number of ways for the local government to act on the urban space.
For example, improving access to clean water and sanitation, reducing exposure to floods and other extreme weather occurrence and ensuring effective transport and storage in order to reduce food waste. Of course, such efforts are part and parcel of making cities more climate resilient. As has been demonstrated in many countries, especially in Africa, the local government can play a key role in partnership with organisations of the urban poor.
The Covid-19 pandemic exposed Nigeria’s underbelly as far as food security is concerned, further exposing the country’s inability to meet SDG 2 – Zero hunger by 2030. Prior to Covid-19, over 821 million people around the world were regarded as food insecure, caused mainly by conflict and social unrest. The World Food Programme also estimated that the number could exceed one billion, given the impact of Covid-19, weather extremes and economic shocks, including job losses, declines in remittances, and disruptions to supply chains and trade. Nigeria was getting hard hit with rates of malnutrition remaining high because nutritious food is unaffordable and not easily accessible for low-income and most vulnerable populations while rates of obesity, linked to unhealthy food choices and lifestyles, had also risen.
This had led to many smallholder farmers continuing to operate at a subsistence level, with relatively low productivity levels and limited local processing and access to markets. There was also limited coordination and cooperation between the key actors who should work together to drive a cohesive and integrated action plan to ensure food security at local, state, federal and regional levels, despite the need for a multi-sectoral approach that comprised health, agriculture, water resources, science & technology, the environment, trade & investment, gender, education and financing landscapes.
It is trite that the attainment of food security in Nigeria requires a collective and urgent collaborative action among the public, private, nonprofit and development sector to feed the country’s most vulnerable, increase farmers’ productivity, reduce the high rates of post-harvest losses, enhance value addition and local processing and ensure market linkages. Essentially the availability and affordability of food also should be increased.
The Covid-19 challenge itself necessitated an urgent need to transform and strengthen Nigeria’s food ecosystems to get the country better prepared to keep people well nourished.
But there is hardly anything to suggest yet that Nigeria learned any useful lesson from the pandemic as food security is still a tall order.
President Bola Tinubu recently weighed in on this dreadful development when he declared a state of emergency on food security due to the rising cost of food and how it affects the citizens’ welfare. Although the president acknowledged that food availability is not a problem, he however admitted that affordability is a major issue to millions of people in all parts of the country, leading to a significant drop in demand that undermines the viability of the entire agriculture and food value chain. Taking the bull by its horn, as it were, Tinubu ordered that all matters pertaining to food and water availability and affordability be prioritised, while declaring that a number of initiatives would be deployed in a matter of weeks to reverse the inflationary trend and guarantee future uninterrupted supplies of affordable foods to ordinary Nigerians.
He listed a number of measures to actualise the emergency, the only immediate measure being releasing fertilisers and grains to farmers and households to mitigate the effects of the petrol subsidy removal. Although other measures listed are progressive, they are for the most part anticipatory and how they would achieve the desired result remains to be seen.
Challenges to food security in Nigeria is legion. But suffices it that poverty is the major problem of food accessibility, availability and utilisation, resulting in insufficient income needed to meet household basic needs.
There are also other political and socio-economic problems leading to food insecurity. Government policy is one of the problems because the policy is often hastily put together and enabling very little or no participation from those who are engaged in agricultural productivity, even as policy change that used to increase incentive for local farmers for improved local food productions are brazenly neglected. Urban and community farming and even home gardening were no longer encouraged as land agents made it too difficult for people to obtain land for building as well as for agricultural productivity.
Poor technology that results from farmers’ poverty and ignorance, population increase that leads to unprecedented rural-urban migration, as well as environmental issues that result from flood, drought and desertification also militate against food security in the country.
A major challenge that cannot also be ignored is endemic corruption in Nigeria, resulting in budgeted money for agriculture being converted to private use. Cases of money meant for importation of fertilisers being siphoned are rampant, although ironically government itself has proved adept at bandying figures of farmers that have benefitted from fertiliser subsidy, some of which are phantom.
Solutions to the foregoing challenges cannot be far-fetched. But they can be layered appropriately for effect.
Improved agricultural productivity can prove key going forward. Research institutes should also be funded to encourage meaningful innovation and concrete research. Through research, foreign technology can be modified and applied in Nigeria.
Extension services should be encouraged and strengthened so that farmers can get exposed to new technology to enhance their output.
Poor storage facilities that often force farmers to sell off their perishable produce can also be improved upon to ultimately enable enough food reserve for the country.
Improved agricultural biodiversity that encourages increasing livestock and crop production should also embraced by both government and farmers, side-by-side managing the environment by reducing the rate of deforestation.
There should be a people-centered policy that puts the farmers first and attacks poverty with opportunities and education. Essentially, this should encourage involving the rural people in decision making stages of agriculture productivity, while not ignoring the reality of the vital tripod of local, state and federal governments in maximising all the interventions needed to guarantee food security for the country.
The Nigerian government can also venture abroad, specifically to Morocco, with a view to borrowing needed expertise to achieve this subject matter. The north African country’s agriculture is irrigation-based and it is estimated that nearly 20 per cent of its arable land is currently equipped for irrigation agriculture which comprises half of Morocco’s agricultural GDP, indicating its higher productivity compared to rain-fed agriculture like Nigeria’s. Remarkably still, Morocco targets improvements in farmers’ incomes, reduction in poverty, food security and less dependency on imports.
If the foregoing represents an agenda for the new Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Senator Abubakar Kyari, it would not be a bad idea. After all, he said upon assuming office on August 21 2023 that food security is topmost of his priorities.
