“Nigeria ranked 13th on HungerFree’s developing country scorecard – but for a country endowed with such rich and fertile soils and Africa’s largest oil reserves, it should be doing much better. It continues to struggle to feed its 140 million people while 26% of its children are malnourished. Shockingly, Nigeria is not expected to meet the MDG target to halve child malnutrition until 2025”
Above is the remark accompanying Action Aid HungerFREE Scorecard where Nigeria ranked 13th out of 28 Countries evaluated. This is a heartbreaking development considering that the country ranked 8th in the 2009.
Presently, about 76millon acres of land amounting to 33% of Nigeria’s land area are being cultivated. This made the agricultural sector the highest employer of labor in the country.
Nigeria's climate permits the cultivation of a variety of crops following a pattern that emerged in earlier centuries in response to local conditions. Like other West African states, rainfall is heaviest in the south, where the forests and savannas benefit from abundant precipitation and relatively short dry seasons. The staples are root crops, including cassava, yams, cocoyams, and sweet potatoes. Tree crops--cacao, oil palm, and rubber--constitute the area's main commercial produce. Cacao, from which cocoa is made, grows mostly in the southwest. Oil palms (whose kernels can be made into palm wine) predominate in the southeast and are numerous in the south-central area.
The northern third of Nigeria, which experiences a dry season of five to seven months, during which less than twenty-five millimeters of rain falls, lies mostly in the Sudan savanna and the arid Sahel zone. There, the staples are millet, cowpeas, and a drought-resistant variety of sorghum known as guinea corn. Corn is also cultivated, as well as rice in suitable lowland areas. The north's principal commercial crops are cotton and groundnuts.
Between the arid north and the moist south lies a Guinea savanna region sometimes referred to as the middle belt. This area produces staples such as yams, sorghum, millet, cassava, cowpeas, and corn, with rice an important crop in some places. The middle belt's southern edge represents the lower limits of the northern grain-dominated economy. The most significant commercial crop of the middle belt is sesame (or Benniseed).
Despite huge agricultural technological advancement in the world, smallholder farmers who contribute two-third of farm production in Nigeria use simple production techniques and bush-fallow cultivation. Most of them tend areas of one-half to two hectares each; and in most areas, grows noncash crops such as sorghum, yams, cassava, cowpeas, millet, corn, cocoyams, sweet potatoes, and rice for subsistence purposes.
A survey conducted by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) between 2001 and 2003 showed that about 18million households in Nigeria were already affected by hunger. Twenty-five percent of children under five were discovered underweight while 42% were reported stunted. This portrayed a food crisis situation in Nigeria. (Hunger Amidst Plenty: Studies on aspects of the food crisis in Nigeria, 2009 Action Aid Nigeria)
At the lunch of the Voices for Food Security Campaign being supported by OXFAM GB and Action Aid Nigeria in June 2009; and at another meeting held on 18th October 2010 organized by the Action Aid Nigeria to mark the 2010 World Food Day and World Poverty Day some of these smallholders farmers were brought together to narrate their ordeals. At the end of the meetings, it came to fore that paradoxically; people feeding Nigeria (smallholder famers) are among the poorest of the country. These farmers wallow in poverty and live in a deplorable state while their efforts towards food production are hindered by factors including:
- Inadequate support from the government in terms of putting in place –
- legal frameworks protecting the smallholder farmers from extortions and other malicious acts of middle men,
- policies encouraging the consumption of locally made food materials;
- Depletion of soil fertilities and inadequate mechanism for distribution of fertilizers and other farm inputs;
- Unavailability of adequate modern preservation mechanism and technical knowhow;
- Unavailability of credit facilities and organized markets;
- Poor infrastructural facilities – especially road network leading to enormous cost of transporting farm produce; and for some who cannot afford such cost couple with inadequate preservation facilities, a total waste of their farm produce;
- Current land tenure system in the country which is generally unfavorable to farmers; and specifically, hindering access to land for female farmers who constitute between 60 – 80% of farming population.
The current situation in Nigeria is unconnected to the fact that investments in agriculture over the last 4 years were far less that the acceptable Maputo Declaration which stated that ‘at least 10% of the annual budget of countries like Nigeria should go to the Agricultural sector’.
The Federal Government of Nigeria in a bid to ensure food security and reduce extreme hunger in the Country’s Vision 20:2020 have indentified the need to
- Increase the agricultural output of smallholder farmers through provision of improved seedlings and fertilizers;
- Sustain the renewed focus of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture on commercial agriculture across the entire country;
- Continue expansion of irrigation infrastructure; and
- Supporting initiatives that protect long-term leaseholds on farmland and the institution of clear property rights.
There is no doubt that conscious efforts to effectively implement the initiatives stated the country’s vision 20:2020 will sure make extreme hunger and food insecurity in Nigeria a thing of the past. Hence there is need for governments at state and local levels to subscribe to, and make plans in congruent to the food security initiatives and plans in the country’s Vision 20:2020. This should be supported with considerable provisions for Agriculture in the budgets at Federal State and Local Government levels; and also putting in place adequate mechanisms for implementing, monitoring and evaluating the plans to appraise its effectiveness.
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