Food Crisis: Lagos Moves To Curb High Commodity Prices

Following the high prices of food items in the market, the Lagos State Government has said it will henceforth enter into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with farmers to monitor produce and also ensure prices are moderate at the point of sales.

Lagos State Governor, Mr. Babajide Sanwo-Olu, through his Commissioner of Agriculture, Lagos State, Ms. Bisola Olusanya, made this known in an interview with New Telegraph in Lagos.

According to her, it will no longer be business as usual for Lagos state farmers as government is ever determined to monitor its investments in them to see the prices they are selling to Lagosians and average Nigerian coming to buy from them.

She said: “The Federal Government, state or even some local governments invest so much in agriculture, but we don’t follow our investments to the market “What I mean is this.

We give farmers inputs, we give processors support, but we don’t follow the products to the market to ensure that the price at which these items are being sold is reasonable for average Nigerian.

“We need the dynamics of pricing to monitor arbitrary charges or those who will play on the margins and at the end of the day will come back to the prices.

“All of our investments in agriculture going forward are tailored in such a way that as a farmer or as a cluster, any support coming to you we want to know who you sell to? Which market the product is going to?

What is the landing price in that market compared to your cost of production? “If not for anything, we must ensure that for our support the average Nigerian, the average Lagosian can see the inputs. Ms Olusanya added:

“When we speak, usually we are all agro practitioners, we speak to ourselves, we speak our language, the average Nigerian out there does not understand that you gave someone a bag of fertiliser, you gave them these seedlings, you gave them that pesticides, the only thing any Nigerian wants to hear is that the price of tomatoes is now at this low price.

That is what they understand by all of the investments we put on our farmers and those who operate within the space. “We, going forward, have said, any support to any farmer, has to be an agreement.

We must be able to say yes, we supported you with this based on this amount and this is the price you are going to sell in the market. “The first fresh food hub at Mushin Idi Oro is just a classic example of how we are able to trace where food items are coming from.

Farmers now have the opportunity to bring their items directly from farm to a space where they can meet ordinary Nigerian consumers and sell. “We are also going to implement government’s subsidy in such a way that there is accountability for any food item coming into the fresh food hub.

We know where it is coming from. We know the quantity that is brought in and we know how much is sold at the end of every market day.

“We now outsource aggregate data and we can precisely say that this is the demand at this location, by this locality, by this population that way we are replicating modern hub across Lagos and imagine this replication taking place all over Nigeria.

We can successfully say this is our real demand. She stressed: “A lot of what we work with as agro practitioners in this place are estimates.

Estimates don’t cut it, you need actual data, you need real figure to be able to lay the right strategies of our investment in this place for people to see the actual yield of all of the efforts that we put in.

“My take is this, whatever investments they are, if you don’t follow it to the market we have only done half of the job and we have just wasted taxpayers money.”