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The Global Food Crisis and Nigeria
By Lateef Oladeji of Gem Business Ventures
I had visited this farmer, Alhaji, as part of my routine duties then as a research officer monitoring the effectiveness of governmental policies on agriculture in Nigeria. It was in the late eighties, when things were relatively or apparently bouyant for our country. Alhaji was full of venom to spit on all of us government wokers because of what he described as government's lukewarm attitude to agricultural development in the country as reflected by poor acesses to agricultural finance, inputs and chemicals. He was also not happy about the marketing facilities available then. As a climax to his eruptions, he foretold that a time would soon come when all of us white-collar and related workers would realize that we could not eat our pens and biros afterall. The worsening global food crisis instantly made me remember Alhaji and his furious prophesy. So he was somehow right? Yes, he was really. Nigeria has neglected agriculture, the mainstay of our economy before the advent of oil. With oil as the "easier" way of achieving economic growth and development, agriculture was relegated to the background. Rather than use oil wealth to promote agriculture further, the latter was almost entirely abandoned. Instead of being a net exporter of food, we became a net importer of it, notwithstanding our wide and wild expanse of arable land and the availability of able-bodied unemployed youths. What a calamitous mistake! Now that the sources of the imported food items are facing dangerous crisis, we are facing a serious problem of hunger and its aftermaths. Rice that used to be available even to the poor man is now becoming out-of-reach for the middle class. Ditto for wheat flour, vegetable oils, and so on. How I pity the wild and the domestic animals that have already started feeling the harsh pinch of hunger. What used to be left over for them before has now been realized by us to be a bad practice of wastage, which ought to be discouraged. Poor animals! In the characteristic calamitous style, our government was planning to set aside 80 billion units of our currency to import rice in order to stem the hunger tide that was already building up. Thank God we still have some wise elders who cried foul against the plan, and suggested using that collossal amount of money to promote our own agriculture. It is a pity I have lost contact with Alhaji since I left my former area of posting several years ago. If he is still alive, he must be laughing and crying at the same time. He would cry for a nation that has always failed to do the right thing at the right time. He would cry for a nation suffering in the midst of potential plenty due to the negligence of our policy makers and implementors. However, he would laugh for beeing such a sharp seer. God save the world from hunger!
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PLEASE VISIT THE CONTRIBUTOR'S WEBSITE
GemHomeBiz
an avenue for social and business links
gbolly54.apsense.com
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This intel was contributed by gembiz
gembiz
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May, 2012
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