A Case for Food Supply and Hard Condition of Life

By

Isa Muhammad Inuwa

ismi2000ng@yahoo.com

There is no gainsaying the fact that people in Nigeria are living in a very difficult condition of life, more so that presently, the world is engulfed in a serious and ravaging recession due to glaring scarcity of food stuff and an accompanying inflation which left currencies of many countries less valuable and their purchasing power much low, that one can only buy few things with much amount of money, which was the reverse case in the past.

Countries in the so-called developing world were already backward in terms of food subsistence and self reliance by all means, lagging far behind the developed nations, on whom they depend for food importation and food aids to survive. The Agricultural potentialities of third world countries were already hijacked and made solely dependent on the foreign farming aids such as modern tools, farm chemicals, pesticides and fertilizer, before they could think of achieving any bumper harvest. The situation is worsened for some African countries during the last farming season as a result of droughts that left many farmers with very low harvest for both self sustenance and for sale at the markets. This is one main cause for food shortage and consequent hike in prices of food this time around.

On the other hand, developed nations of the world are known for embarking on large scale farming in form of highly mechanized modern farming system that most often gives them yields far more than their needs. In such case, they are known for storing surplus food stuff that can survive them for quite some years to come, to the extent that they can supply such surplus to less endowed countries without having any problem of shortage. However, everything is subjected to its kind of politics, particularly by the advanced European countries. For instance, some of those countries were said to dump some of their surpluses into the sea, rather than to export them to needy countries, just for the sake of politics in the field of food supply and markets. For those countries, supplying their surplus to any less endowed nation would make them sufficient and consequently independent of food importation, there by blocking the markets and sales of food to such countries.

It could be recalled that in the past decades, Nigeria was known for its mass production of food through agriculture and in addition, the country produced cash crop for international markets, such as groundnut, cocoa and cotton. In fact, Agriculture was the first and foremost main source of Nigeria’s revenue, before the discovery and excavation of oil wells. Now that the countries is even richer than before, with additional lucrative sources of oil and gas as well the Agricultural potentials, there is no reason why the country would continue to rely mainly on imported food for the people. In situations such as the present however, food importation could serve as a matter of necessity for Nigeria, until the emergency situation is over, then Nigeria could revert to dedicate on serious large scale farming to ensure mass food production for the ever increasing needs of its large population.

But the biggest question is that “what are Nigerian authorities and the government doing to salvage the situation, by coming to the rescue of the common man, through some policies to cushion the people’s sufferings?” It seems that nothing of this nature is yet on ground for Nigerians, in spite of the eight years of the country’s Democracy, with the Executive and the Legislative arms of government in place, no single move is yet done to address the people’s sufferings. Instead, the teeming Nigerians who always go to polls and vote their representatives into power are eventually left to find solutions for themselves. It is just for the government to put the necessary machineries and wherewithal on ground and guide the people through, so that everything about the economic activities would move smoothly. But instead of supporting the private sector, say the large scale and small scale farmers as well as the small scale entrepreneurs, Nigerian governments operate as if they have no obligation and totally have no stake in the private sector development. This is one main reason why things went in disarray, decades after the country’s independence.

Another contributory factor in the general failure of modern man in this modern world is that almost every facet of our life is being guided on sheer speculative tendencies and human clever antics, (which is limited and often selfish). For instance, the issue of speculative business of hoarding and large scale smuggling of food stuff at the period of abundance say harvest season, with the intention to hike prices of food at subsequent times, (for the benefit of few opportunistic people), ironically contributes to food scarcity and high cost of food items, beyond the purchasing power of the common man. Hence in Nigeria, the idea behind creating and running of so-called commodity markets, such as the Abuja Commodity Market, with branches in some parts of the country, is one instance of modern and cunning way of hoarding of food items, at the detriment of the poor buyers and against the open system of free market of our economy.

Although the Commodity Market was said to have been introduced in order to protect the small farmers from suffering loss form low prices of farm produce at the harvesting period, this could be an unacceptable reason, if we pose a question that - what do the Commodity Market operators stand to gain? By serving as middlemen and raking a commission charge for themselves, they tend to further escalate prices of food items, in addition to causing its scarcity and encouraging its hoarding. We ought not to forget the simple economics law of supply and demand, at which, the lower the supply (it can be artificially created scarcity), the higher the demand would become, hence the higher the price of such items in question (in this case, food items).

Apart from such speculative and middleman trade in food mentioned above, another major threat to food supply world wide, is the modern idea to convert staple food items, (more particularly those that are used daily by majority of the masses such as corn, maize and the likes), as sources for “alternative energy” to replace fuels such as petrol and gas used in cars and other machineries. Although this device is thought to give some relief to the ever rising price of fuel in the world, unless special provisions are made to produce separate and additional staple food for that purpose, it would otherwise seriously affect food supply, distribution and prices the world over. Recently, the United Nations Secretary Mr, Ban Ki-Moon and the World Bank President have cautioned against the idea of using food as “alternative energy”.

Indeed, the current situation of food scarcity and high cost of food items calls for emergency effort to arrest it and for both world leaders and individual heads of nations and countries to hasten and find ways of relieving and emancipating their people from the quagmire. Another alarming thing is that some major countries suppliers of food to other countries, like India and Thailand and China have banned exportation of food to outside world. Also with the move by the United Nations of setting up a committee to address food crisis currently being experienced the world over, the idea is a welcome one and added to that, it is pertinent if the third world, particularly the impoverished African nations would be the top most priority in this mission against hunger.

For some time now, Nigeria’s Federal Government has responded to calls and advises to resort to food importation, in order to supplement the strained internal food supply; thereby making it in abundance, hence its consequent decrease in price. A further advise here is that in view of understanding wisdom in food importation, even as a temporary solution and after which indigenous food production should follow, the Federal Government should also device a very just and workable distribution mechanism, for the imported rice to reach down to the common people. Those to be entrusted with the distribution job should be very careful, conscious as well as very tactful as to break the circle of shylock opportunistic middlemen and fortune seekers, who may tend to make the commodity unaffordable and unavailable for the weak, poor common Nigerian.