It’s about time the Nigerian city achieved a rural sweep. We should profit from what we grow. Right now, our cities deify baubles and digital enlightenment, which are superfluous to the country.
This is why social life and commerce get grounded in the heat of a crisis. At the outbreak of the coronavirus, for instance, economic activities in most cities got grounded. It was as if the metropolis and the wheels of industry didn’t matter.
Before the advent of big tech; before our cash crops and wildflowers got decimated by murderous herdsmen and their ruck; before pastoral farms frothed with pesticides and fishes floated belly-up in Ewekoro and the oil creeks in Niger Delta, we grew what we ate.
Cities don’t produce food. They depend on the countryside to provide it. Save their food distribution systems, cities can quarantine, shut in, and shut down, so long as the countryside doesn’t.
A deeper look at our fate through the pandemic revealed how worthless the Nigerian city is, with its parade of glitz and chug-chug of industry. But for the country’s agricultural economy, Nigeria would starve.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has his work cut out for him. His agricultural policy must manifest beyond passionate pronouncements and gazetted intent.
The wellspring of wealth is agricultural surplus, the ability to feed more than one with the labour of one. Agricultural surplus built the groundnut pyramids of the north and the cocoa plantations of the southwest.
Nigeria was a leading agricultural economy in the 1950s, being the largest producer of palm oil, groundnut, cotton, and cocoa globally. The sector employed over 70 per cent of the labour force and accounted for as much as 62.3 per cent of the nation’s foreign exchange earnings.
Over the last four decades, however, the yield of most key crops has declined, in particular, cassava, cocoa beans and wheat – a reflection of low utilisation of improved seedlings, agrochemicals and poor adoption of technology, according to a recent Price Water House report.
The yield of rice on the other hand has increased steadily, resulting from government’s increased support for rice production, by providing subsidised agrochemicals and credit facilities through various intervention funds.
In contrast to yield, land usage in Nigeria has increased across key crops, like cassava, cocoa beans, rice paddy and wheat. This has been primarily driven by an increase in the population engaged in farming, although production remains at a subsistence level.
For most key crops, Nigeria’s share of global production has remained low. However, the rate of consumption has outstripped production. The deficit has been met largely by importation, making the country a net importer. On average, between 2011 and 2015, N1.4 trillion has been spent on food imports with wheat, milk, rice, sugar and malt extract, constituting the bulk of Nigeria’s food import bill.
Consequently, Nigeria is vulnerable to changes in global agro-commodity prices, with a significant impact on inflation and foreign reserves. Between 2011 and 2015, agro-processed exports declined by 41 percent to N143 billion. These exports, which accounted for an estimated 20 per cent of Nigeria’s non-oil exports in 2015, were mainly leather and processed skin, alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, tobacco and cocoa derivatives.
According to the FAO, Nigeria is estimated to have lost US$ 10 billion in annual exports of agriculture and agro-processed commodities including groundnut, palm oil, cocoa and cotton as a result of the decline in production of these commodities.
In addition, the Nigerian Export Promotion Council (NEPC) attributed the decline in food exports to non-compliance with regulatory and documentation requirements for food imports to the European Union and the United Kingdom.
Also, the World Bank estimates that Nigeria and other developing countries could have lost as much as US$ 6.9 billion in 2015, as a result of food export rejection.
These challenges have stifled agricultural productivity, affecting the sector’s contribution to the country’s GDP. It has also led to increased food imports amid skyrocketing population and declining levels of food sufficiency.
For instance, between 2016 and 2019, Nigeria’s cumulative agricultural imports stood at N3.35 trillion, four times higher than the agricultural export of N803 billion within the same period.
Of its 92.4 million hectares, Nigeria boasts 82.0 million hectares of arable land; so far, just 34 million hectares of it have been cultivated. With population explosion and government’s renewed drive to boost food security, agriculture has become increasingly crucial to our survival as a nation.
Understandably, former President Muhammadu Buhari sought to revivify the country’s agricultural economy at his assumption of office in 2015, and then, in 2019. Despite his rural preachment, the country’s fixation with oil rendered her a whited sepulchre, sullied by wastefulness and vice, the soot that will not out.
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Nigeria needs agriculture. Agriculture employs about 70 percent of the country’s population thus it can be used to drive sustainable growth prospects through a value chain that turns raw commodities into processed goods for domestic consumption or export.
President Tinubu must fund the diversification of agriculture to make it more appealing to a vast youth population that is spiritless about farming but might be attracted to processing, marketing, and other business opportunities along the value chain.
The food emergency in northeast and northwest Nigeria brought on by the Boko Haram insurgency, banditry, infrastructure deficits, and the government’s response to them emphasises the need to expand the agricultural sector to guarantee food security and nutrition.
Until then, the Nigerian city will subsist as a plague; it is diseased because its sensuality is both morbid and commercial. Its hidden graces unclad, like the proverbial harlot, self-exiled from the village but always returning under cover of night to stalk and prey on the countryside.
The Nigerian city does too little for the countryside. Knowing this, President Tinubu announced his decision to resurrect the country by endowing its agricultural economy with remarkable fillips. To achieve this, he must ensure that both his team and tools, unlike Thel’s worms, aren’t pathogens miming his curative mantra.
Tinubu must understand that his government cannot achieve agricultural boon simply by pronouncing passion to resources. He must thoroughly examine if resources are pronounced to his passion.
While the rationale for prioritising agriculture is sound, many reforms will have to be enacted if the sector is to flourish. These reforms must also include measures to save rural Nigeria with the sheen continually sponged off its greenery by the city.
It was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York, writes Dyson.
Hay was responsible for Nigeria’s first brush with economic glory. Between 1962 and 1968, Nigeria’s major foreign exchange earner was the agricultural sector where palm oil and groundnut made up around 47 per cent of the country’s exports. However, Nigeria’s position as an agricultural powerhouse declined through its oil boom.
Caught between the womb walls of the crude oil creeks and digital tech, Nigeria lives imprisoned in starvation’s bower. Yet the government recites fantastic stories of agricultural rebirth thus rejecting the strife of contraries by which Nigeria convulses.
At the outbreak of COVID-19, our storied artifice collapsed in hysterical retreat as the country leapt from its tinseled perch and dashed, shrieking back to its native valleys.
What was hitherto regarded as an underprivileged fetish and peasant preserve became our major source of sustenance and rebirth. Nigeria weeps but does not recognise her tears.
