Column: Why the gist about Food security will remain an illusion

By Alex Abutu
Over the years, the federal government has initiated policies, programmes and projects targeted at ensuring thatNigeria becomes self-sufficient in food production in order to attain the status of a food-secured nation but rather than celebrate these initiatives, we are still not sure if the country will ever reach that point where we can pop the champagne.
Considering the human capital investment, the country has put into the various initiatives aimed at achieving a food-secured nation we should be counting our gains by now but unfortunately, that is not to be as we seem to be missing some very critical elementsin our quest.
So, let’s begin by asking what is food security? Food security is the measure of the availability of food and the ability of individualsto access it. According to the United Nations’ Committee on World Food Security, food security is defined as meaning that all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their food preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life. The availability of food irrespective of class, gender or region is another one.
According to Wikipedia, at the 1974 World Food Conference, the term “food security” was defined with an emphasis on supply; food security is defined as the “availability, at all times, of adequate, nourishing, diverse, balanced and moderate world food supplies of basic foodstuffs to sustain a steady expansion of food consumption and to offset fluctuations in production and prices”.
The first World Food Summit, held in 1996, stated that food security “exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.”
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, or FAO, identified the four pillars of food security as availability, access, utilization, and stability.
A review of Nigeria’s quest for food security shows that certain fundamentals need to be addressed to ensure that efforts geared toward the attainment is on the right path.
Among those fundamentals is agricultural extension service, one very important component of the agricultural value chain. Agricultural extension is the application of scientific research and new knowledge to agricultural practices through farmer education.
The extension services in the country was revived with funding support from the World Bank between 1975 and 1995 and this resulted in some significant progress especially with the establishment of institutional structure for a functional extension service in the country but almost 30 years after the World Bank support ended, the extension service in the country has collapsed with the last corps of employed extension agents retiring from active government services in the next few months. By next year, most states of the federation will not have any active extension agents.
Another impediment to our food security is the inability of farmers to differentiate between seeds and grains. My father, a seasoned farmer similar to most farmers in my local store, harvests and replants from that same stock in the next planting season. They walk into the market and buy grains in measure and plant. This has hindered productivity as what we are planting all over the place is what is meant to be eaten.
Our agricultural revolution is devoid of technological strategies, meaning, we have been doing the same thing over the years and expecting different results. The era of hoe and cutlass reliance is gone, now the size of your land is no longer as important as what you plant and how you plant it.
The limitation that requires urgent intervention is funding by government and the privatesector. Today, Nigeria has over 16 agricultural research institutes and many agriculture faculties and departments in the over 100 universities in the country. But 90 percent of the research or crop improving studies going on at the various institutions are based on foreign grants.
No nation can attain food security with foreign support because foreign support is like aid, something given out when they have enough. It is high time our government introduces and enforcespolicies that make funding of research mandatory for both public and private sector players.
Food security can be attained if the architecture of our agricultural system is overhauled with a well-defined extension programme that would ensure one agent services at most50 farmers as against the current practice where one agent services almost half a million people. Our farmers can do better with good information and education powered by the extension agents hence the need for our government to design some programmes that facilitate voluntary agriculture extension services as part of the National Youth Service Corps to balancethe ratio of extensionagents to farmers in the country.
We also need to begin a national awareness campaign on seed management so that farmers don’t make seed saving from previous harvest their priority but let them know that what they are planting is grains meant to be eaten while seeds need to be bought to guarantees 95 percent purity and germination rate.
With good funding, our institutions will be able to attract and retain the best of the best and also develop and produce high quality and early maturing crop varieties capable of fast tracking our food security programme and ensuring Nigeria becomes a food secured state where no one goes to bed hungry.