The National President of All farmers Association of Nigeria (AFAN), Arc Kabir Ibrahim, has emphasised that agric stakeholders and the the three tiers of government (federal, state and councils) must work towards Nigeria’s quest to attain food security.
He said this had become expedient in the wake of surging food insecurity, climate change, low mechanisation inputs and others.
Ibrahim, who doubles as the President, Nigeria Agribusiness Group (NABG), in an interview with New Telegraph on telephone, disclosed that insecurity, climate change impact, mass corruption around the country’s agric sector and others shouldn’t be ignored as they are definite threats to the country’s path to food security.
He said: “On whether there are threats to our path to food security, I will say yes. Definitely, there are many threats and factors to the attainment of food security in Nigeria. I will read them out to you.
“We have a lot of insecurity on where the farmlands are, as the farmers are not able to seamlessly go to their farms for harvesting, and of course, then you can see climate change, we have flood, we have droughts, in so many places.
“We also have very low mechanisation, and again, there is so much corruption in the food system in this country. Since COVID-19, we have had challenges in the food system. COVID-19 was a global crisis, but we had our problem.
Like I mentioned, insecurity is a very serious threat to the attainment of food sufficiency and food security. “Once smallholder farmer cannot produce appreciably to feed his family and then feed others and also being able to scale up even export, a country like Nigeria with over 200 million people will definitely be in dire need of foods.”
Ibrahim continued: “Our position in Africa is that we also feed the neigbouring countries around us too. So we need to work very hard and everybody needs to put their hands on deck.
“Government needs to invest more and it has to incentivise people, and the people coming into agriculture should learn how to do it, has a business, not has a subsistence farming and that is the only way we can get food security.”
Speaking further, the AFAN national president stated: “In other climes, the countries that called themselves food secure are not practising agriculture at subsistence level, they are doing agriculture as business.
There are many small countries in the world that are doing great work in agriculture, take The Netherlands for instance, with about 17 million people, about 50,000 people farm all year around and they are able to get income from agriculture far in excess of any country in the world except only the United States.
“So Nigeria has a lot of arable land, 90 million hectares thereabouts. We have a very young population, people who can till the land if need be and we can also deploy mechanisation.
“I mean we can look incountry to do that because that is what Brazil did. Brazil, until recently, was adjudged as a Third World country, but today, it is a net exporter of food.” The NABG helmsman further explained: “Look at Argentina.
Argentina got into the world just like us right now, we are even buying maize from Argentina. So, we can do a lot for our agriculture and then feed our people.
“We must have it on our fingers that today we are 200 million people, in about 26 years, we will be 400 million, so what is going to happen? We must work assiduously to make sure that there is enough food in the country.
“I mean the recent protest by youngsters is an indication that all is not well in the country because people are hungry.”