….Charts Roadmap To Nigeria’s Long-Term Food Security
The Chairman Voices for Food Security (VFS), Prof. Gbolagade Ayoola, has flawed the latest fiscal policy measures which removed import tariffs on some food items, describing the introduction of the tariff reliefs as ill-timed and capable of potentially undermining sustained efforts to achieve food security in the country.
The frontline food security advocate in a Note on the latest Federal Government’s measure described the fiscal initiative as undesirable for the sustained efforts towards consolidating food security drives in Nigeria as the government failed to calibrate the policy measure as a short term adjustment mechanism in the context of a longer term plan on the roadmap to food security.
Aligning his voice with the position of the African Development Bank (AfDB) President, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, the VSF Chairman maintained that the opening of the nation’s borders to massive food importation for a number of months would ultimately hurt the food economy of the country.
Ayoola, who also the President of Farm and Infrastructure Foundation (FIF), pointed out that economically speaking, government as the utmost policy authority cannot deploy a short term policy instrument to combat a malignant long-term food insecurity policy problem.
He acknowledged the possibility of a shock causing food market disequilibrium even when implementing a food security programme presenting as food inflation and food scarcity and originating from certain socioeconomic discontinuities such as weather, civil unrest, insurrection etc, affecting food production and supply of food to market from time to time.
According to him, when such disequilibrium occurs in the food market government needs an emergency policy measure like this one to adjust the equilibrium, and that is exactly what the state of emergency actually entails – doing what is not normal to fight back against unwarranted disequilibrium in the food market.
To logically respond to such whirlwinds, Ayoola, who is also member/committee chair Nigeria Zero Hunger Forum (NZHF), canvassed: “Government needs to calibrate such unusual policy disequilibrium measure of a short-term nature in the context of a longer-term plan, in order to ensure that it does not move one step forward on the roadmap and two steps backwards on the same path.
“The point being made here is that, it is if and only if the adjustment or so-called emergency policy measure does not totally or more than offset your past forward movements towards food security that you are economically better off in deploying the short term policy instrument; otherwise you are worse off in taking that short term policy measure.
“In that regard, the problem is that government is taking the wrong foot forward, by proceeding with a short term policy adjustment without a solid long-term plan specifically for prosecuting the state of emergency on food security previously declared yet; so government is just doing what appears right in its own eyes but not what is necessarily right economically this time around; which in good conscience it does not matter that government actually had a good intention for doing so anymore. In all honesty it won’t fit and cannot work that way.
“That is to say, government first needs to have defined or articulated its long time policy pathway to food security and embark on its implementation, before carrying out such a surgical emergency operation on the food system of Nigeria, following which and in which context it behoves government to carry out the necessary adjustments if and when required.
Suffice it to say that what government is doing now is not necessarily wrong but it’s doing so very wrongly”, the VSF chairman stressed.
Ayoola maintained that to do such policy adjustment rightly, the FIF had provided for government just before it came to power with the Right to Food Act No. 34 of 2023, to provide the appropriate framework for articulating a long term policy landscape for food security of this country, with which to implement its declaration of emergency on food security, but lamented that the government refused to acknowledge or countenance let alone embark on its conscious implementation for the purpose till now. The food security advocate strongly stressed that “therefore government cannot build something on nothing and expect it to stand, or better still government cannot attempt to climb the tree from the top and expect happen.
“Thus, the present food importation policy is just another policy somersault, one which is grossly ill-advised, ill-conceived, and literally dead wrong on arrival. It should be immediately retracted before it festers at all”, he added.
