Agriculture was the mainstay of the Nigerian economy, before the 1970s oil boom. But government investment in agriculture has sharply declined since then. The situation has gotten worse in the 21st century, with increasing insecurity in the country, particularly in the northern geopolitical zones. Between 2020 and 2022 for example, crop production declined by a whooping 47.2%.
Nigeria lacks food security. According to the United Nations, the proportion of the country’s population that will go seriously hungry in the coming years will rise up to 64%. But the ruling class has no programme to end hunger and enthrone food sovereignty. The reason for this is simple. Profit always comes first for them. It is always first and foremost about how they will make more money and not about working-class people having an adequate amount of nutritious food. Even when attention was paid to agriculture before the oil boom, it was simply because it contributed over 60% of the country’s foreign exchange earnings.
Obviously, for a country like Nigeria with the population size, food sovereignty must be emphasised to ensure ecological transformation, appropriate food production, distribution and consumption, social-economic justice and local food systems as ways to tackle hunger, poverty and guarantee sustainable food security for its security, in most part of the country Malnutrition has become part of the dividends of its democracy, because indicators used in analysing the level of hunger globally does not take cognizance of the larger part of the society who doesn’t even have food to eat in the first instance, hunger as such is the basic expression of a social problem which is avoidably inherent in a capitalist society. Historically, capitalism by its very design and programmes has no commitment to protecting the dignity and rights of the people.
Successive governments have tried to implement policies that would enhance capital accumulation in the agriculture sector with the capacity of the country to tackle hunger and poverty being of secondary concern. Starting from the Yakubu Gowon regime in 1973 with the National Accelerated Food Production Project, Specialized Marketing Boards and other programmes like the Operation Feed the Nation by the Obasanjo regime, these policies have not been able to foster development or ensure food security. By 1986, the Babangida regime introduced the most disastrous economic prescription for the working people with the adoption of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) by the World Bank and IMF as a precondition for its sponsored loans, which had trade liberalisation as its core mandate. This had a huge catastrophic impact on the already toiling farmers all over the country. Local and indigenous farmers were left to compete with global investors and multinationals, the effect of this was to facilitate food imports to the country. Initially these were cheap. As the naira’s value fell, they became increasingly expensive. But we did not have the capacity to do away with them again as food production had sharply declined.
With the failed policies of different governments, Nigeria became heavily dependent on oil. Local and indigenous farmers were abandoned by the government. In fact the Green Revolution Programme by the Shagari government and the Abuja Declaration on Fertilizer for the Africa Green Revolution by the Jonathan Administration became more of conduits for syphoning monies into the pockets of those in government and their supporters. With trade liberalisation that had kicked in since the SAP era, private investors were enabled to make land grabs thereby displacing the local and indigenous farmers who were already at the mercy of international competition. Rather than invest on crops for domestic consumption, private investment was majorly on cash crops for export and then allowing for more importation of food items and goods, the full privatisation drive by the Obasanjo by the early 2000s was a testament of the greedy and cancerous nature of capitalism.
There is a pressing need for smallholder farmers to organise, including as cooperatives, and thus build power with which to force the government to stop its pro-big business policies in agriculture. Those failed policies cannot lead to food sovereignty. The working class must forge close alliance with the small and middle farmers, and demand agrarian reforms that will strengthen the power of farmers and build the capacity of attaining food sovereignty and end hunger in the country.
by Kelvin AYEMHENRE
