By Suleiman Abbah
Food security, according to the United Nations’ Committee on World Food Security, is defined as meaning that all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient and safe food that meets their preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life.
At the 1974 World Food Conference, the term “food security” was defined with an emphasis on supply of basic foodstuffs to sustain a steady expansion of food consumption and to offset fluctuations in production and prices.
There is evidence of food security being a great concern many thousands of years ago, with central authorities in ancient China and ancient Egypt being known to release food from storage in times of famine.
And as international food prices reached unprecedented levels in modern times, countries sought ways to insulate themselves from potential food shortages and price shocks. Several food-exporting countries imposed export restrictions. Certain key importers began purchasing grains at any price to maintain domestic supplies. However, it also became evident that the global economic crisis in 2008 and 2009 undermined food security in many countries, including Nigeria.
The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020 report urged a transformation of food systems to reduce the cost of food and increase its affordability. Yet the specific solutions will differ from country to country, and even within them, the overall answers lie with interventions along the entire food supply chain, in the food environment, and in the political economy that shapes trade, public expenditure and investment policies.
The study called on governments to improve their approaches to agriculture; work to cut cost-escalating factors in the production, storage, transport, distribution and marketing of food – including by reducing inefficiencies and food loss and waste; support local small-scale producers to grow and sell more nutritious foods, and secure their access to markets; prioritize children’s nutrition as the category in greatest need; foster behaviour change through education and communication; and embed nutrition in national social protection systems and investment strategies.
In 2000, world leaders gathered at the United Nations to shape a broad vision to fight poverty, which was translated into eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). This remained, until 2015, the overarching development framework for the world. The global mobilization behind the Millennium Development Goals has produced the most successful anti-poverty movement in history. The MDG target of reducing by half the proportion of people living in extreme poverty was achieved in 2010, well ahead of the 2015 deadline. The proportion of undernourished people in the developing regions fell by almost half. However, a lot more work needs to be done.
That work is now the focus of the Sustainable Development Goals. Food is at the core of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the UN’s development agenda for the 21st century. The second of the UN’s 17 SDGs is to “End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.” Achieving this goal by the target date of 2030 will require a profound change of the global food and agriculture system.
In the midst of this globally predicted food crisis and a daunting security situation in 2015, Nigerian voters trusted Muhammadu Buhari to lead the nation through and out of those limitations, into a future in which they will live secure lives and pursue livelihoods in a united Nigeria whose resources will be protected by leaders.
Those elections were about the possibility that, with a credible and accountable leadership, Nigerians could look to a future without Boko Haram; that the young will get good education, acquire skills and get jobs; that corruption will be arrested, contained and eliminated. The elections were preeminently a celebration of an end of poor governance; to leadership that run away from threats, and to leaders who remembered the people only when they needed votes.
This commentary is not intended to whitewash or smear the Buhari administration, yet it is important to point out that at the peak of electioneering for the general elections in 2014, virtually the entire North was a battlefront, and the nation was a hostage of Boko Haram.
Few months into first four-year tenure, the Buhari administration kept one of its major campaign promises by ensuring a vastly-improved security atmosphere in the North, with Boko Haram pinned to enclaves.
Fellow Nigerians living far away from the effects of Boko Haram may be tolerated if they downplay the significance of the successes against this murderous insurgency, those from the North, however, understand what it means to have had that change of administration in 2015, because, without a doubt, the previous administration would have been routed completely by an insurgency that understood that weak political will and corruption had weakened the national resolve to fight it.
Back to his promise to tackle the issue of food insecurity, when Buhari assumed the country’s presidency in 2015, he aggressively moved for a radical diversification of the nation’s economy with a comprehensive agricultural revolution programme.
The administration identified the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme as an essential policy instrument for achieving economic diversification through agriculture.
It was designed to encourage investments in agriculture and empower smallholder farmers as drivers of transformation in the agricultural sector and as critical enablers of economic growth.
Some of the components of this goal are: ending hunger, ensuring access by all people to safe, nutritious food; doubling the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers; ensuring sustainable food production systems and increasing investment in agriculture.
This was followed up by the government decision to close the Seme border between Nigeria and Benin Republic in August 2019 to strengthen the agricultural sector and curb massive smuggling activities, especially of rice along that corridor.
Dividends of Buhari’s agricultural revolution began to show on Wednesday January 18, when he unveiled Mega Rice Pyramids by Central Bank of Nigeria and Rice Farmers Association of Nigeria (RIFAN) in Abuja, signalling that the price of rice deliberately imposed on Nigerians by marketers aggrieved by the boarder closure will soon fall nationwide.
The rice pyramids made up of 1 million rice paddy was achieved through the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Anchor Borrowers’ Programme (ABP), a programme launched in 2015 to boost agricultural production and reverse Nigeria’s negative balance of payments on food.
The significance of Wednesday’s occasion, as rightly pointed out by the President, can be better understood by looking at the various economic strides the administration has achieved through agriculture.
The one million rice paddy stacked in 15 separate pyramids is an initiative by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in collaboration with the Rice Farmers Association of Nigeria (RIFAN). The bags of rice were planted and harvested from states across the country under the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme (ABP).
Despite and in spite of this commendable effort to feed, the nation, self appointed political enemies and a misguided gullible section of the public persist in assessing and judging the Buhari phenomenon against several incredible expectations and hopes; against fair standards of judgment, including the judgment from his political opponents, against developments and circumstances that no one knew the nation will confront, and even against the failures and abuses the nation is having to pay for from the previous administration.
Hardships that have been building up since the early part of the Olusegun Obasanjo administration resulting from the massive looting of the treasury and downright theft of the national resources that have exacerbated the recession in the economy as from 2015 and compounded by the drastic fall in global oil prices have been seized upon by the forces of retrogression to embarrass the government and give it a bad name.
This they do in stack ignorance, or in deep denial of the fact that for two decades, leading up to the millennium, global demand for food had increased steadily, along with growth in the world’s population, record harvests, new technologies, improvements in incomes, and the diversification of diets.
Food prices have continued to decline through 2000, though in 2004, prices for most grains began to rise. Rising production could not keep pace with the even stronger growth in demand and food stocks became depleted. And by 2006, world cereal production had fallen by 2.1 per cent. In 2007, rapid increases in oil prices increased fertilizer and other food production costs.
Projections now show the entire world is not on track to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 2, Zero Hunger by 2030 and, despite some progress, most indicators show that the food security status of the most vulnerable population groups is likely to deteriorate further due to the health and socio-economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2021 report, the pandemic is intensifying the vulnerabilities and inadequacies of global food systems – understood as all the activities and processes affecting the production, distribution and consumption of food.
The latest edition of that report, which was published mid-2021, estimated that between 720 and 811 million people went hungry in 2020. High costs and low affordability also mean billions cannot eat healthily or nutritiously. Considering the middle of the projected range (768 million), 118 million more people were facing hunger in 2020 than in 2019 – or as many as 161 million, considering the upper bound of the range.
Abbah wrote this piece from Kaduna
