Home >> Africa >> Nigeria & Niger

     Email   Print 

Yar’ Adua and the Food Crisis: The Road Not Taken

Joel Nwokeoma - 5/20/2008

There is an element of inescapable truism in the age long assertion that fate often throws up circumstances upon which men are judged, either by what they did or failed to do thereon. When viewed from this perspective, it becomes incumbent on men, though seen as hostage to fate, to be more mindful of their eventful actions and inactions. This obviously cannot be far from what a fellow had in mind when he remarked during an informal chat the other day, that, head or tail, President Umaru Yar’Adua would also, in many years to come, be remembered as the one under whose reign the food crisis hit the nation. When asked to clarify, he explained that one of the legacies of the President after his tortoise-like reign would most likely include how he responded to the current raging global food crisis.

Not that the President is the cause of the crisis (at least, the Minister of Commerce and Industries, Charles Ugwu, according to newspaper reports, laboured so much to impress it on the nation recently that it would be uncharitable to associate the food crisis with the President as it is a global phenomenon), but what the minister failed to understand is that the President would be surely remembered more by Nigerians, read judged, by his actions (and inactions) in response to this global phenomenon.

Admitted, however, that the food crisis is a global phenomenon, but nations are at liberty to articulate strategies of addressing it. Given this therefore, there is the need to examine or put in proper perspective Nigeria’s response to the food crisis with an aim to ascertaining the propriety and pertinence of such an intervention in line with circumstantial realities. President Yar’Adua took three measures that have gone a long way in revealing his understanding, or lack of it, perhaps, of the global phenomenon. First, at the aftermath of an emergency meeting with state governors and relevant ministries related to food security in the country, shortly after his return from Germany for “medical review”, the President approved the immediate release of N80 billion from the National Resources Development Fund (NRDF) for the, wait for it, importation of 500,000 metric tonnes of rice from Thailand. Second, he also approved the immediate release of about 11,000 metric tonnes of grains from the Federal Government Strategic Reserve as additional measure to augment an earlier release of over 40 million metric tones. Third, he ordered the suspension of import duties on rice for six months.

As well meaning as these measures might seem, it is appropriate to note that they evidently show, as pointed out earlier, a manifestation of poor judgment of the severity of the issue at hand. Many commentators and public policy analysts have since deplored what is generally seen as the trivialization of a matter that has the high possibility of impacting on our national security, or who does not know about the food security – national security nexus? (The Vanguard Newspaper, in particular, in an editorial on the issue, had picked holes in the apparent confusion of the food crisis with ‘rice crisis’ by the government, perhaps, necessitating the approval for large scale importation of rice into the country.

The height of the trivialization of the food crisis by government was the subsequent order for the suspension of import duties on rice imports for six months. When this measure is viewed against the backdrop of the realization that the global food shortage would last for the next four or more years, the shortsightedness of government becomes more sickening and pathetic. Besides, what seems to make the rice importation measure more laughable is that government intends to import from a country that has cut down, or even stopped exportation of rice in order to meet the local demand of its citizens. As someone else pointed out recently, given this year’s record low harvest across the world, reputed to be a 22-year low, coupled with accompanying high prices, food aid from traditional surplus producing nations such as the United States, in particular, has been negatively impacted. Same way, other surplus producing countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Thailand as well as other Common Market nations are restricting sales of food, which means that “non food producer nations who may however have the capacity to import (like Nigeria) would be disappointed, thereby leaving their populations in biting hunger and starvation”.

This evidently shows that the President’s measure is a very desperate and unsustainable one. In fact, the surest, and most sustainable measure, which incidentally is the road not taken by the Nigerian government, is the boosting of local food production through making agriculture more attractive to a large population of the people. If the truth must be told, food shortage is a function of deliberate missteps of Nigerian governments over the years, chief of which is the neglect of the agriculture sector. This is made even more evident by the fact that the population of farmers in the country is ageing as the country’s rural areas have systematically been made inhabitable for the young population, who should be involved in large scale farming. Instead, Nigerian urban areas are crammed with youths who, left with nothing to live on, have turned into motor cycle riding. Thus, it is true that President Yar’Adua did not cause the food crisis, but his response would obviously acercebate it instead of addressing it.

It is both a shame and a sign of our leadership failure that a nation blessed with about 99 percent arable land and with over 75% of its population living in the rural areas cannot feed itself, but would depend on sundry food importation to address a pressing developmental challenge as feeding. What more, it is even more tragic that no effort is made to show an appreciation of this reality with an aim addressing it by this government. At least, its response to the subsisting food crisis loudly attests to that.

Over the years, Nigeria was reported to have been allocating only three percent of the annual budget to the agriculture sector despite the recommendation of a 10% minimum by the United Nations, yet in 2006 alone, the country spent a whooping $2,797billion on food importation. This has resulted in a scary national statistics where 65% of Nigerians are food insecure with little or no access to a balanced diet, about 40% of children under five years stunted, 9% wasted and 25% underweight apparently due to malnutrition.