AN expert in agriculture sounded a warning at the recently concluded food summit held between December 4 and 7, in Abuja, that unless present trends were reversed, Africa will experience an overall annual food shortfall of 250m tons by 2020.

The expert, Dr. Cyril Enweze, head of delegation of International Fund for Agricultural Development, IFAD, had declared "agricultural production needs to rise, at least, by some six percent for Africa to be able to meet its food needs and for African agriculture to become a real motor for economic development."

The present trends being referred to include factors like food insecurity, wide spread poverty etc. Although food insecurity is a disturbing phenomenon in virtually all continents of the world, it is especially critical in Africa.

Enweze releveals: "Of the 36 hunger hotspots in the world identified by FAO, 23 are in Africa. With Africa's population growing by about three per cent per annum, agricultural production has, in most areas, been declining in per capita term." Therefore, it becomes a matter for concern as this development is reaching worrisome stage in the developing economies.

Nigeria is one of these economies that face the challenge of meeting the food security requirements needs of her citizens today, an economy where the peasantry type of agriculture is still dominating. Added to this is failure of past governments to address the threat of food insecurity. Governments made agriculture a sober business by failing to provide farmers with the necessary modern equipment in line with the trend elsewhere in the world, or simply called mechanised faming. The public did not see committed attempts by governments to reverse the ugly trend. And this left the peasant type of agriculture profile to hit 70 million today. There is in existence a government's project, as usual, that seeks to address the problem. Hardly did it solve the problem. The much touted rural development programme is being described as misguided conceptual issue. And, perhaps, from the onset, not meant to address the problem of agriculture.

Well, that is on the one hand, on the other, the government failed to deal with the problems of commercial agriculture in 2005. It might be necessary, at this juncture, to remind ourselves that the agriculture sector is the mainstay of Nigeria's economy. Infact, the sector contributes 30.8 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and accounts for 70 percent of the entire labour force of the country. But then, the sector, due to year-on-year dependent on the oil sector, is a weeping boy of the lot.

The Nigerian soil is well endowed with mineral resource and huge agriculture potentials even though the weather is predominantly rainfed, which means that in any year the rainfall pattern is normal, harvests are plentiful, and vice versa. In view of which government is expected to play a leading role and take advantage of vagaries of climate through the aid of technologies, of course, usually far above the reach of individual investors in agriculture because of their capital intensive nature. Agriculture, nowadays, involves heavy machines, silos, improved seedling, biotechnology and experts. How many, in the rank of the 70 million peasants, can afford the machines?

Yet, they contribute to the 30.8 per cent GDP. That agriculture is private sector-led can not be argued. But, the sector should be kick-started by any responsible government. One of the ways of showing how responsive is creating policies and initiatives that are business friendly and backed by legislation. That is the roadmap to sustaining food security.

The Chief Olusegun Obasanjo led administration has vowed to reverse the worrisome trend of neglect of the sector by increasing, to seven percent, budgetary allocation to agriculture. Obasanjo observes that there is no area in which sustainable development is more important in terms of human welfare than in the field of agriculture.

He also states that the goal of his administration is to attain food security for all citizens within the shortest possible time. But, with the threat of hunger, rural - urban migration, lack of government's encouragement to farmers coupled with galloping cost of living, it is feared that the future may be bleak.