After prolonged bouts of hunger and hardship, Nigerians are experiencing some relief as the prices of some staple foods are dropping. The road to lower food prices has been long and thorny. It should therefore be celebrated and sustained.
President Bola Tinubu’s spontaneous removal of fuel subsidy during his inauguration on May 29, 2023, and the subsequent naira floatation, combined with ravaging insecurity, birthed a season of crushing privations.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the food inflation rate rose to 24.82 per cent in May 2023 and soared further to 40.66 per cent in May 2024.
However, in September, food inflation decelerated to 16.87 per cent from 21.87 per cent in August, attributed partially to seasonal price drops and food imports.
The World Food Price had projected in 2023 that 31.8 million Nigerians, or 16 per cent of the population, would experience severe food insecurity between June and August and that nearly one million would be in the emergency food insecurity bracket.
In its 2025 outlook, a not-for-profit, the Global Hunger Index ranked Nigeria 115th out of 123 countries with sufficient accessible data. Africa’s most populous country scored 38.2, rated as a “serious” case of hunger.
The details are overwhelming: 19.9 per cent of the population is undernourished; 33.8 per cent of children under five are stunted; 11.6 per cent of children under five are wasted; 10.5 per cent of children die before their fifth birthday.
With the Boko Haram insurgency unending, banditry, communal clashes, separatist agitation and the Fulani herdsmen rapine, the settled farmers have been thrown out of their farms.
The outcome is the scarcity of food production.
This is worsened by the high logistics costs due to the removal of fuel subsidies, ‘nuisance taxes,’ absence of railways, and scanty storage that provokes wastage estimated at 40 per cent of total produce compared with about 33 per cent in South Africa.
This was the dire situation the country was in before succour came in the third quarter, when the country began to experience a drop in the prices of some foodstuffs, including yams, cassava, rice, millet, and sorghum.
The price of a bag of local rice has now dropped to between N55,000 and N59,000, down from N88,000. One paint bucket of beans now goes for N5,000, down from N6,000. The price of yam tubers has reduced slightly.
A report in the Daily Trust said farmers are unhappy about the price drop, although the public feels the opposite.
Indeed, the prices of rams, chicken, fish, beef, and eggs are still high. The price of 1kg of gas has shot up to N2,000 from N1,050.
For now, the price decrease will not be felt across the board, as the purchasing power of Nigerians is too low.
The Federal Government had opened a 150-day duty-free window in September 2024 for the importation of essential grains such as rice, maize, sorghum, and wheat.
Sadly, the farmers who had made huge financial investments in grain production before the intervention resorted to hoarding their produce even when the citizens were hungry and consequently lost huge sums of money.
Therefore, government intervention should be equitable and expansive.
The government must establish a system to buy off surplus harvests from farmers to save them from losses and keep them in business, as was the case in the regions in the First Republic.
The web of connivance that makes local food items more expensive than imports, including illegal fees at ubiquitous checkpoints by transport unions and law enforcement officials, should be dismantled.
The Federal Government and the state governments should urgently expand the rail system to make the transportation of goods seamless and bring down the cost of food items.
The 2,000 tractors promised by the Federal Government should be delivered and deployed, while efforts should be made to encourage mechanised farming to achieve the desired food security.
The government should provide food storage and preservation facilities to check the persistent post-harvest losses and to generate food surplus, as is the practice elsewhere.
As history records, food scarcity can trigger social instability, provoke unrest and bring governments down. The high cost of bread led to the “bread riots” in Egypt in 1977 and protests in 2011.
Therefore, the government should learn to heed food crisis warnings, adopting workable strategies to achieve sustainable food security.
The Punch
