In all spheres of socio-economic development of Nigeria, there have been traces of failure which have given rise for calls for drastic measures to be taken in order to improve on the country’s present status of a failing economy, especially in food security. Nigeria is today at the bottom of other African countries in terms of socio-economic development.
Among the 105 countries presently assessed by the Global Food Security Index, GFSI, of the Economist Intelligence Unit, Nigeria became the 80th with 34.8 based on the indices of Affordability, Availability and Quality and Safety.
Areas in which the country was rated as weak having scored less than 25 include public expenditure on agricultural research and development where it scored 0.0; presence of food safety net programmes, 0.0; gross domestic product per capita, 3.0; proportion of population under global poverty line, 9.6; food consumption as a share of household expenditure, 9.6 and protein quality, 12.8.
This is abysmally low compared to South Africa which was ranked as the 40th (61.7) and which only weakness is in gross domestic product per capita of 18.8. The country recorded 72.8 for sufficiency of supply; political stability risk, 66.7; proportion of population under global poverty line, 66.5; agricultural infrastructure, 61.1; volatility of agricultural production, 55.8 and access to financing for farmers, 50.0; public expenditure on agricultural research and development, 50.0; diet diversification, 43.9; protein quality, 41.4 and micronutrient availability, 38.0.
South Africa was ranked 38th (61.1) on Affordability, 33rd (63.6) on Availability and 52nd (57.9) on Quality and Safety. But Nigeria, the hitherto Africa’s agricultural giant in the 1970s, ranked 103th (15.4) on Affordability, 50th (51.5) on Availability and 84th (37.2) on Quality and Safety.
Conversely, while Nigeria scored favourably only in two areas of volatility of agricultural production and micro-nutrient availability; South Africa scored in 14 areas, including food safety, sufficiency of supply, protein quality, access to financing for farmers, nutritional standards, agricultural infrastructure and diet diversification, among others.
It is imperative, therefore, for Nigeria to embrace the modern food production techniques that have come in the form of Agricultural Biotechnology and which, in Africa, are being introduced by Biosciences for Farming in Africa, B4FA. This technology is aimed at improving crop and livestock production through biotechnology tools that include conventional plant breeding, tissue culture and micro-propagation, molecular breeding or marker assisted selection, genetic engineering and genetically modified, GM, crops and Molecular Diagnostic Tools according to scientists.
A leading nation in agricultural production in the seventies but now ranked as one of the lowest in food production, Nigeria must have to double the productivity of nutritious crops like yam, maize, beans, etc through plant breeding, to be able to feed future populations.
According to a Plant Physiologist, Dr. Inuwa Shehu Usman of the Institute of Agricultural Research of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, the result of Nigeria’s ranking is from the tidal wave of population growth against the low agricultural productivity. “While we have our population expanding, we have less agricultural production. The productivity of our farmers is very low. There is the need for us to look at modern technologies that are capable of bringing about multiple food production and that is where Biotechnology comes in.”
In order to tackle the current problem that placed the country 80th among 105, Dr. Usman emphasized the urgent need for concerted efforts on research and development. “We need to improve on our performance by reducing the down line between research and development. We also need to respond to this urgently in order to be able to meet up with the nutritional requirements of the country,” he said.
With biotechnology, what would be achieved in 15 years could be achieved in five years, especially where farmers are able to access the technologies.
The potentials of these new crop varieties call for the need to develop these improved varieties and hybrids because it is unacceptable that, while Zimbabwe’s national average of maize production is 11 tonnes per hectare of farmland, Nigeria produces only two tons per hectare of maize.
This article was first published Vanguard Newspaper
