Going by the current efforts by the federal government aimed at reducing food inflation in the country and the results so far, one cannot but applaud the government on this feat. Reports indicate that the prices of food items, especially locally produced ones such as rice, garri, tomatoes and yams have fallen drastically, even though they are yet to return to the levels they were about ten years ago.
The compelling reasons behind the government gesture in this direction stems from the common saying that a hungry man is an angry man. And no nation can survive under intense anger by her citizens. Though some analysts hold the view that fallen food prices have ocoured mainly due to the concessions given to importers of foreign food items and the harvesting season being experienced by the local farmers, it must be placed on record that the level of fear of hunger expressed by the people at the beginning of the year has been substantially allayed.
Despite the fact the threat of the Fulani herdsmen to farmers in Nigeria is not yet overcome, the food cultivators have remained unrelenting in their efforts to survive through the works of their hands, thereby helping to bring food to the tables of fellow men and women at reduced costs.
Unfortunately, in spite of government efforts at encouraging citizens to go into agriculture, with a view to achieving food sufficiency, the sector has largely remained in the hands of the peasants who have no say in government. Even when government offer to support them, such helps often end up being high jacked by fraudulent persons with access to the authorities that be.
The dilemma the Nigerian farmers found themselves is worsened by the inability of the government to also reduce the prices and fees on other items such as refined food items from abroad and school fees that apply to both farmers and salary earners whose incomes have increased tremendously in an attempt to make workers financially buoyant enough to cope with food inflation.
As those engaged in agricultural practice are crying for protection from being kidnapped, raped or killed, government has continued to compound their plights with policies to bring down the prices of food. They do this sometimes by offering import duty wavers to exploitative business men and women with financial wherewithal to order for food stuffs such as rice from overseas where they are produced for the consumption of the few privileged Nigerians that can afford them, not local practitioners of agriculture.
Access roads to many agrarian areas have remained poor. This, coupled with the high cost of transportation occasioned by the high cost of fuel makes it difficult for farmers to move their produce to urban towns where they can make better sales. With this hindrance, the peasants are left with no options than to sell their items to merchants who come to them in their ‘bush markets’. This people buy cheap and sell to city dwellers at exorbitant prices, thereby making humongous profits at the expense of the struggling local farmers.
Farmers’ groups such as cooperatives are so poorly organised that only a few privileged fellows amongst them are able to obtain agricultural loans from government agencies. Providing acceptable collaterals for such loans have equally remained a tedious task for them.
Many Nigerian farming communities have been deserted by young men and women who do not see future hopes remaining in their domains where social amenities like electricity power, portable drinking water, and medical facilities and so on are not available for healthy living. This translates to difficulties in finding capable labourers to be hired for farming exercises. Farmers are therefore often left with only one choice – hiring the same dreaded youths with the same characteristics as the herdsmen or Boko Haram and other terrorist groups.
The implication of government leaving things the way they are presently is that very soon, only few farmers will afford to continue to take the risks of going back to farm during planting seasons. Therefore wiping out hunger from the nation as the government intends may remain a difficult task.
It therefore behooves governments to immediately begin to put heads together with local security outfits with a view to making farm lands safe for farmers.
Additionally the federal government must come up with policies that will ensure that farmers’ goods are procured at profitable prices from them while subsidising same for the final consumers. More so, government must intensify efforts towards granting loans to farmers at one digit interest rate per annum.
Hunger as a weapon of war, if not eliminated in Nigeria, can become more dangerous than Alfred Nobel’s dynamite. The time to stop it from compounding the country’s myriad of challenges is now!
