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Nigeria Food Basket Declining Into Basket Case By Farouk Martins Aresa
Nigerians that are old enough remember how we used to brag about feeding the rest of West Africa compare to how 0-0-1, 0-1-0 or 1-0-0 has become the order of the day. It is breakfast, lunch or diner but not all. Food production has dwindled to the point where we have to recruit farmers from Zimbabwe to help increase cassava production to feed more people. As food production decreased relative to population increase, our oil production has increase so much that it has snuffed out our mental capacity for hard and honest jobs.
Make no mistake about it; food is a weapon and a powerful one at that. Nobody standing toe to toe with you holding a weapon can induce or order you to drop your weapon. It is nothing more than asking you to lie down and play dead while he blows your brain out for being stupid. If we surrender our seeds or eggs, our most reliable weapons, and replace them with exotic seeds “eunuchs” that can not propagate, we are bound to go for more as we run out. We either buy with our oil, on credit or reach out our hands like the Somali or Ethiopians begging for food while others satisfy their conscience on television and magazine displays.
In the face of famine, Africans can hardly resist genetically modified seeds for fear of some abomination. After all if a banana tree dies, it is replaced by its siblings – bi ogede ba ku, afi omo ropo. No respectable yam farmer would cultivate his farm without yam tubers? Nigerians outside the Country spends a big proportion of their income chasing African food and yam for particularly for that special flavor. That does not mean our agriculture experts can not use the same genetic science to develop disease resistant seeds. India and Thailand are now in short supply of rice for export, we would not care if we had our own seeds in abundance to feed the rest of West Africa as we used to.
We are getting a great deal of help from World Bank imports as we ignore our yields. They have all types of designer seeds made by big international corporations like Monsanto, sold to us in exchange for our oil. While we run out of oil, they can never run out of psychedelic seeds. As we neglect our seeds or our universities and technical centers are incapable of improving our seeds, their designer seeds will completely replaces ours as we become dependent on outsiders for daily bread handouts.
Without resources to exchange for hard currencies, we might become a basket case. In our Nigeria, we have a nation bigger and more populous than many poor countries. If we are fleeing now because we can not feed our families three times a day; Nigerians, what are we going to do with 140 million people?
Unknown to many, there is a storage of world seeds in a control bank underground in the North Pole where the Western World is prepared in case of worldwide disaster. Those who watched American CBS 60 Minutes a couple of weeks ago must have learnt some lessons. Do we depend on them to share their stored seeds with us when calamity strikes if we neglect to establish our own?
Those who used to fish and farm to feed their families without worrying about currency can no longer do so. Even worse, those from non-oil producing areas of Nigeria have abandoned their farms in search of easy contract transactions waiting to be paid back from the spoils of oil exported out of Nigeria. According to the Agriculture Minister, we have not utilized over half of our irrigable land potential. In essence, we are depleting our natural seeds that will feed us faster than the rate we are running out of oil.
Nigeria is more concern about bio fuel where food that is meant for human consumption is turned into energy for machines. Brazil has an agreement to teach us how, the whole world is doing it and Nigeria must follow…, pity! While the appetite of machine is being met, the cost of animal products that feed on corn or cassava has also gone up as more humans starve. See this writer’s - Machine Competing With Man For Staple Food.
Many of us could have preferred energy from conversion of garbage, human and animal wastes that are well known technology we can be improved on, if we are really concern about the environment. In Lagos, Jakande actually started it and we thought finally, that would keep Lagos clean. As in everything else, we never keep up or follow up on what our rivals started. Some of those wastes could also be useful as fertilizers rather than beg World Bank to give us loan facilities to buy from their favored countries. Well, if they are dishing out the money, we have to patronize their countries, over our own initiatives.
We are comparatively so flushed with money from the oil we export that most are lost to oil farming polluters and direct looters. We worship so much money itself there is hardly any appreciable infrastructure to point to in support of oil. Since we can not eat money, it has become a commodity for a few to hoard. It is like king Midas who gets up every morning to admire his collection of gold. In the mean time, we can not even maintain and enhance the infrastructure to take care of the environment producing our black gold. If the oil companies pack up and go today, it will become a waste land.
We recently watched a Nigerian peace-keeper policeman die in Haiti during food riot. Haiti a black country that fought for its independence before all others “happens” to be the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Yet, Haitians like Nigerians prosper outside. South Africa also demonstrated against high food prices. Mwalimu Nyerere tried that Arusha “nonsense” in Tanzania, called self reliance. Before it became example for other Africans to follow, they never knew what hit them. But Nigeria with all its luck, never fought for independence like Haiti or South Africa. Blessed with as much black gold as Ghana’s real gold carted away, we never knew what to do with it. Our foreign advisers and consultants are “helping” us out, a few of whom are Africans dancing to the tune of their pay masters.
It is not how much a country has in cash that matters; it is what is done with that cash before market manipulators or inflation melt down. Just like an individual, it is not how much you make but how much you keep in investment that will grow that matters. It is like the story of those who God gave more talents but never use it like Nigeria compared to those he gave little talent but grew it into investment like Japan. Our conspicuous spenders are hoarding and wasting our talents because they are all brawls and no brains. What good is money if the majority of the people that own it can not enjoy its use?
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