Food prices have continued to skyrocket in the country despite numerous measures put in place by the Federal Government to stem the tide. The present administration like the successive ones, does not relent in efforts to address these challenges, but it appears that they have come to stay, writes COLLINS NNABUIFE.
Nigeria, no doubt, has been grappling with the challenges of food insecurity due to factors ranging from insecurity, naira devaluation, high cost of farm inputs, high interest rate, climate change and others that have direct or indirect effects on agriculture.
The present administration like the successive ones has continued to make efforts to address these challenges, but it appears that they are not fading away anytime soon.
During the last yuletide season, Nigerians groaned as food prices, and other items skyrocketed beyond the ordinary man’s reach. Despite promises to crash food prices by the government, the reality in the market still overshadows these promises.
In the coming months, farmers, especially in the South will embark on wet season farming, while their counterparts in the North have entered the final phase of dry season farming. Ordinarily, knowing what the country is going through, the government is expected to roll out measures that will ensure a bumper harvest.
One of the major challenges facing Nigerian farmers is insecurity. If this menace is not addressed farmers will continue staying away from their farms because on several occasions bandits have killed and kidnapped them while on their farms.
Kabir Ibrahim, the President of All Farmers Association of Nigeria (AFAN) said, “Once you have an insecurity that is preventing our farmers from going to their farms seamlessly, definitely the productivity is impaired”.
He maintained that as long as farmers are killed and kidnapped indiscriminately while trying to produce food for Nigerians, food production will continue to decline if the situation is not addressed.
Furthermore, Ibrahim said there is a need to incentivize the smallholder farmers who are the engine room of food production, to address climate change and post-harvest losses.
“All the things that we need to do to mitigate the effects of climate change, we must start doing them seriously, because we committed to it in COP28 and even in COP29. Once we don’t stop the emission of greenhouse gases, climate change will be there, we have been in denial but you can see that for four years consecutively, we have been having flooding and drought. Before now, we used to have flooding in 10-year intervals.
“We also need to incentivize the smallholder farmers because up till now in Nigeria, the engine room of food production is still the smallholder farmers, because we have very low mechanization; we have very few commercial farmers. So, these are the things the government has to do. For the short term, the government has to invest massively in subsidizing many of the farm inputs so that the smallholder farmers will be able to produce optimally.
“If the smallholder farmers and small-scale producers are properly incentivized, we can get to a position of food security because other countries, even in Africa have gone very far. So, the things that we need to do is to refocus and realign our policies and strategies to food production, and we should minimize post-harvest loss because it is one thing to produce, and another thing to lose it because you have no energy, your power sector is almost gone.
Meanwhile, the government in 2025 has taken some steps to address some of these challenges. Recently, the government, through the National Agriculture Development Fund (NADF), signed a contract with AGCOMS International Trading Limited to procure 2000 John Deere tractors valued at $70 million.
The Executive Secretary of NADF, Mohammed Abu Ibrahim, said NADF has been mandated to implement one of the four mechanization programmes of the Federal Government. He explained that there are various mechanization programmes, and the NADF was implementing one which is the John Deere 2000 tractors which include ridgers, harrowers, combined harvesters and other equipment.
“We got the conveyance of the Federal Executive Council (FEC) in October and we have taken 3 months to go on very robust and intensive negotiations with John Deere; we have also had a stakeholders’ engagement. The John Deere tractors hopefully would be delivered before the wet season. We have also entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) which would hopefully provide the AGCOMS with a space within the port where they will set up their assembling plant and have these tractors delivered to the various parts of the country as will be contained in the implementation programme”, he said.
The NADF has been mandated through a Presidential directive to spearhead the deployment of 10,000 John Deere tractors across Nigeria, with an initial rollout of 2,000 units scheduled for first and second quarter of 2025 and scaling up to 10,000 over the next 5 years.
Also recently, the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Nigerian Identity Management Commission (NIMC) to create a database of farmers.
One of the challenges the government faces while rolling out interventions for farmers is the issue of identifying the real farmers. Many times, some incentives from the government fall into the hands of portfolio farmers.
With this database, it will be easy to identify real farmers as the government rolls out its interventions in the coming months. The database, known as the farmer register, will utilize the National Identity Number (NIN) and biometric information to identify genuine farmers and their farmland. This will help address issues and provide targeted support to farmers. In the pilot phase, two million farmers will be registered within three months, with plans to upscale to 6 million in the second phase.
The NIMC has a three-month timeline to capture the biometric information of farmers and has formed a working group to operationalise the plans. To reach rural farmers, the NIMC will partner with the private sector and utilize its offices in every local government across the country. The initiative also includes a financially inclusive card that will provide various functionalities for farmers.
The Minister of Agriculture and Food Security said the government will, “Use the platform that NIMC has, that is to say, the National Identity Number (NIN), and also the card, which will contain all the biometric information of the individual farmer. First and foremost, what is key about this is we are going to identify the farmland or the farm space and also plug in the farmer. So that is where we are now going to actually register a genuine farmer, which will have only one biometric and one NIN number. So we know precisely we are going to have a register that seeks to intervene and support a genuine farmer that is an advocacy register, and that will restore all kinds of issues that we have had”.
These are good initiatives from the government, but there is also the need to address the high interest rate, especially for agriculture and agro-processing. No farmer can survive the current bank lending rate.
Also, insecurity must be addressed before tractors will be deployed to the farms. The Agro Rangers must be strengthened to protect farmers and their farms. The Nigerian military must tackle terrorism and ensure farmers are not killed or kidnapped. The government needs to address these challenges because the cost of food in the market is pushing Nigerians to the brim, without food security, national security cannot be achieved.
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