Food sufficiency and access to it is a basic requirement for human survival, peace and political stability in every nation.
Several reasons that point to the food crisis occasioned by banditry, kidnapping and record-high inflation have since become too obvious to be ignored in Nigeria. The involvement of the youth who, in their large numbers, thronged the streets in the last nationwide hunger protest was a clear indication of hunger in the land. It became an opportunity for the government which hitherto doubted the cost of inflation on the daily life of Nigerians to believe that hunger was one of the harsh realities that drove the recent #Endbadgovernance protest; an expression of public anger that lasted more than a week.
Hunger on the scale of a national phenomenon is a manifestation of food insecurity. The main drivers of food insecurity (or insufficiency) include poverty, insecurity of lives and natural factors such as drought, environmental degradation and climate change. Hunger could be a source of poor health such as malnutrition and undernutrition. Individuals need a certain minimum caloric intake and nutritional supply to function. Inadequate units of calories in the body does not only slow down growth in children, but also affects productivity in adults whose activities are required to propel the country's economy. A healthy population is the greatest economic asset of a nation.
Nigeria's arable landmass, which if maximally utilised, is enough for the country to feed not only its population, but the entire African continent. Nigeria has 34 million hectares of arable land; the largest in Africa. While 6.5 million hectares is for permanent crops, 28.6 million is for pasture. With a strong political will backed with concrete policies, agriculture remains Nigeria's most reliable and sustainable economic base.
If there was any agricultural investment which the Nigerian government ever got right, it was the creation of the River Basin Development Authorities (RBDAs). While the consequences of the Sahel drought of the early 1970s and a decline in agricultural output that was induced by the country's oil boom informed their establishment, we are today faced with greater challenges that make public desire for the revival and strategic reorganisation of the RBDAs more compelling than those that prompted their creation.
Today's farming challenges include the annual loss of large-scale farmlands and crops to devastating floods in addition to the emergent threats of climate change; all of which grossly affect Nigeria's food production capacity. This is even as the country's annual domestic food supply is far below what is needed to feed its population. This explains why Nigeria's self-sufficiency in food security requires more than just wet season farming. A round-the-year farming which involves irrigation is, thus, a necessity.
The establishment of the RBDAs dates back to the creation of the Sokoto River and Chad River basin authorities in 1973. Nine more RBDAs were created in 1976; bringing the total number of such agencies to 11. While each of the RBDAs had the mandate to operate in a defined geo-morphological boundary, they collectively had the task of improving agricultural production and rural development through organised irrigation schemes. For the period that these RBDAs functioned effectively, their impact on food production was visibly felt in the country.
For instance, the huge agrarian and socio-economic gains from the good old days of the Hadejia-Jama'are and the Niger RBDAs have indelibly remained glorious in the memories of farmers in the North West and North Central geo-political zones of Nigeria. Like the rest, these two RBDAs made farming through strategic technical interventions leisurely attractive and profitable for farmers. Farmers now have dire need for the activities of the RBDAs.
Besides easing Nigerian farmers' access to the resources that will make dry-season farming friendlier, the government is urged to go beyond speech making and window dressing rehabilitations by activating, revitalising and strategically reorganising the country's failed RBDAs to achieve food security. Luckily, the country is already blessed with abundant water resources and naturally endowed vegetation. The full exploitation of these potentials will not only make agriculture a prime driver of the nation's economy, but also a key employer of the unexploited labour of the teeming population of the youth. Nigeria has all it takes to be on the global stage of dry season agriculture; ranking higher than where Libya once stood.
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The government's attempt to renew the hope of citizens will not go beyond rhetoric if the majority of Nigeria's over 200 million population cannot feed well. As a matter of national concern and consequence, we call for the revival, reinvention and deliberate repositioning of the RBDAs. After their revival, the RBDAs should be given new timelines and mandates that will make them more relevant.
We also encourage the government to adequately fund research institutes, including the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Ibadan, Oyo State; the Nigerian Agricultural Extension Research and Liaison Services (NAERLS) in Zaria, Kaduna State; and the National Cereals Research Institute (NCRI) at Badeggi in Niger State, to increase their outstation activities in rural communities. A mutual synergy between agricultural research institutes and functional RBDAs is one guaranteed way for achieving food security in Nigeria.
