Nigeria is facing an imminent food insecurity created by insurgency, Russia-Ukraine war and lack of favourable policies, reports OpeOluwani Akintayo
With the ongoing Russian-Ukraine war, coupled with a lack of good government policies to drive food production and preservation in the country, experts have alerted of Nigeria’s imminent food insecurity and the likelihood that the situation could worsen if various levels of government do not act fast.
A group of food experts at The PUNCH Media Foundation webinar monthly series for June themed, ‘Food Security, Nutrition and Food Safety’, harped on the need for Nigeria to enact good policies, ramp up power supply for industrial food storage, increase local food production and decrease importation.
They also said that arming local farmers with adequate climate knowledge would help to improve food cultivation.
While highlighting some of the challenges faced by local farmers while preserving their produce, a seasoned journalist and Editorial Board Chairman of Nigeria Info Radio Group, Rotimi Sankore, said Nigeria lacked the industrial capacity to store food due to low power generation.
“There is a point I would like to make as one of the key reasons Nigeria is food insecure. The issue is electricity. I hope most people know that Nigeria is at 5000 megawatts (MW ) and sometimes it is at zero. The global standard for sustainable development is 1000MW per one million people. So, Nigeria should be at 200, 000MW, but we are at 5000MW or less. So, why this is important is that we don’t have the capacity to store food on an industrial scale. Developed countries store foods in warehouses, the size of stadia where forklifts are driven around to bring down food.
“But we can’t store food here as we have orange season, mango season, and other seasons as if our stomachs have seasons for food. This has been linked to malnutrition.”
Sankore said food insecurity was one of Nigeria’s biggest national issues which should draw the attention of policymakers.
“Food security is one of our biggest national issues. The big picture is always very important because this is what most of our policymakers miss, and what the masses should see and know. The Russian-Ukraine war is going to result in widespread hunger, especially in Africa and the Middle East, and I doubt if Nigerian policymakers are prepared for this.
“I doubt it because we saw what happened during the #EndSARS protest which was made worse by the lockdowns. People were hungry and even uniformed men and women carrying babies on their backs were grabbing cartons of noodles and bags of rice. The key thing to learn is that the level of food insecurity in the country is seriously underestimated. Now that Russia has been sanctioned, the food insecurity in Nigeria is about to get worse. Sadly, Nigeria is neither food secure nor sufficient, which has led to malnutrition and has a severe impact on people’s health,” he added.
A United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation report said about 19.4 million people would face food insecurity across Nigeria between June and August 2022.
The report, compiled in collaboration with the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and other stakeholders, analysed acute food and nutrition insecurity in the Sahel and West African region before arriving at the conclusion.
The report said that the food crisis would affect Nigerians in 21 states and FCT, including 416,000 Internally Displaced Persons.
It noted that about 14.4 million people, including 385,000 IDPs in 21 states and FCT of Nigeria, were already in the food crisis till May 2022.
Speaking further, one of the panelists at The PUNCH food webinar and Executive Secretary at HEDA Resource Centre, which works with policymakers, academics, activists, women groups, farming communities, and young people to promote food security and sustainable development, Sulaiman Arigbabu, said Nigeria had one of the lowest per hectare yield in the world. He linked Nigeria’s low per hectare yield to the low support given to small-scale farmers by the government.
According to him, the government needed to support local farmers with necessary, accurate and timely climate information for the country to experience a boost in food production.
“The quantity of food that we failed to produce is even more than what we lose. Nigeria does not provide the farmers with good, accurate, reliable and timely climate access. Many farmers plan when they should not and lose after they have borrowed money to plant. The opportunities lost are among the major reasons we have food insecurity,” he said.
A research by Imo Jacob Otaha of the Department of Economics, the University of Jos on ‘Food Insecurity in Nigeria: Way Forward’, said there was a high level of food insecurity in the past four decades as a result of neglect of food production when oil was the major export product.
He blamed the adoption of neo-liberal economic policies such as devaluation of naira, trade liberalization, withdrawal of government from economic activities, ethnic and religious conflicts, among others, as factors that had contributed to food insecurity in Nigeria.
“Unfortunately, most of the food needs in Nigeria are produced by peasant farmers who lack capital, skills, energy and other viable ingredients to produce in large quantities that will meet the requirements of the growing population. Thus food insecurity in Nigeria is a recurrent and double-digit problem,” he said.
According to him, it was widely accepted that Nigeria was not a poor country except that it had been poorly managed by those entrusted with its development.
It was also widely accepted that Nigeria was rich enough to feed herself and the rest of Africa, he noted.
Jacob listed some of the causes of food insecurity in Nigeria as gender inequality; policy inconsistencies and corruption; poverty and hunger; conflicts and natural disasters.
He opined that for the dream of food security to be realised, agricultural policies must target peasant farmers and their rural environments, and not multinational companies producing on a large scale for export and profit.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation had, in 2021, said at least 9.2 million people in Nigeria faced a crisis or worse levels of food insecurity between March and May amid armed conflicts, COVID-19 effects and climate change.
Of these, an estimated 3.2 million were in Adamawa, Borno and Yobe states, the FAO said in a statement.
“This figure is expected to increase to over 12.8 million people, of whom 4.4 million are in the three northeastern states, during June – August 2021, unless resilience-focused and humanitarian actions are taken,” it warned.
The FAO’s statement also highlighted the increasing number of forced displacements in the country, particularly in areas where armed attacks were more intensive, saying that it affected the lives of millions of people in Africa’s most populous country.
“Increased violence and forced displacement continue to affect the humanitarian situation in northeastern Nigeria – the key hotspot of the armed conflict in the country – that has been further aggravated by trade disruptions and an economic decline linked to the effects of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19),” the FAO said.
Professor of Community and Public Health Nutrition, University of Nigeria, Nsukka and current President Federation of African Nutritionists Society, Prof. Ngozi Nnam, said unsafe food created a cycle of diseases, malnutrition and food insecurity.
According to her, if food was not utilised, food nutrition and security would be jeopardized.
She advised that safe food should be provided for the body for due utilisation.
“Diarrhea is the major hospital visit by children. Contamination of safe food can cause diarrhea which could lead to death,” she said, adding that contamination should be avoided by separating raw foods from cooked foods.
She also advised that food stored in the fridge should be consumed within five days for safety, adding that cooked food should be consumed within two hours after preparation to avoid contamination.
A participant at the webinar, Lànà Á Òdubèlà, narrated his ordeal as an agricultural investor in Nigeria.
“I am a snack food manufacturer based in the UK. I also own a factory in Europe, with an annual turnover of seven figures. I have invested millions to revive the agricultural sector in Nigeria and it was all a waste of effort and investment. The corruption in the system is all the way to the grassroots. Insecurity is a whole different issue. All we do in Nigeria is textbook talk,” he said.
Another participant and student at the University of Ibanda, Bamidele Ojo, said Nigeria’s challenge was not just insecurity, noting that the cost of living was now very high.
“We want the government to look into the high rate of the dollar,” she advised.
Founder, Farm Awareness for Food Preservation Initiative, Edu Ogbonnayan, said the role of stakeholders in achieving safer food could not be over-emphasised.
He advised that Nigerian citizens should have access to safe and nutritious food at all times to enable them to live healthy lifestyles.
“Most times, farmers are ignorant of their practices, so, it’s important we tackle health issues from local farmers. That is why we have to give them awareness to enable them to come out with safe food, and one of the ways we do that is to advocate for organic farming,” he said, adding that some of the challenges facing farmers such as access to adequate land and funds should be adequately addressed.
A board member of the Lagos State Market Advisory Council, Mojisola Odusanya, representing the Iyaloja General of Nigeria, Folasade Tinubu, told audience at the webinar that there were several facilities (such as pest control, cleaning programme, environmental hygiene, trainings and webinar) put in place to ensure that everything sold in the markets were safe for consumption.
The Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Just Food, Tunde Ogunride, said his firm had a legal obligation in making sure that the food it served was wholesome and safe for consumption.
“Anything we ingest is food, including water, there are several precautions that must be put in place in any food place to make sure that food is safe and healthy.” He listed some of the precautions to include ensuring that chemicals from farms used at restaurants were well cleaned and washing food properly before preparation.
