Osinbajo’s Task Force on Food Prices

Idang Alibi argues that the task force is not in the best interest of farmers

Let me begin this piece on an honourable note by making full disclosures. Apart from my work as a public servant, I am also, quite proudly, a small-time farmer. My dream is to become a billionaire through farming and my simple plan is that after my public service career, I will spend the rest of my days on earth growing rich and wealthy, producing food to feed God’s hungry children wherever they live on planet earth! A part of my motivation is that whenever I go abroad and see Murtala Nyako’s Admiral Mango in shops, I feel so proud seeing that it is from my country. I dream of one day seeing ‘’Idang Alibi Pure Palm Oil’’, for instance, in grocery stores all over the world.

As a testimony to my involvement (not yet prowess) in farming, last farming year, I put about 20 hectares of land under cultivation and produced, from my labour and sweat and ingenuity, a variety of food produce: yams, rice, beans, cassava, soya beans, assorted vegetables and peppers. Chances are that you may have eaten some of the stuffs produced from my farm! I feel justly proud of this attainment.

This disclosure is necessary because as a farmer rich in practical experience about how food is produced in Nigeria especially by millions of small holder farmers, I am going to argue here that the task force constituted last Wednesday by Acting President Yemi Osinbajo to see how rising food prices can be contained is bad for all concerned- the government, the citizens and the farmers- if not in the short term, but surely in the long term. My stand may offend some people who want food cheaply regardless of the consequences. My principal argument is that food prices in Nigeria are not high enough (at least for the farmers) to act as an incentive for them to produce more and as such, no attempt should be made to reduce food prices ‘artificially’ as Osinbajo’s Task Force may attempt to do.

Others in the food chain, such as the middle men, may get high prices but the farmers who actually produce the food do not get anything commensurate with their labour. As far as I have seen, Nigerian farmers are the unacknowledged philanthropists of the federation.

While as I said, I got very rich in experience about food crop farming in Nigeria, I became poorer for my involvement as I lost about a million naira last year. And this happened not because of inexperience on my side or any flaw in my character or a costly mistake on my part or a lack of sound agricultural practices. It happened simply because it is just not profitable to engage in certain kinds of farming in Nigeria. Farming can only be worthwhile for non-peasant farmer if he has the means, the machines and the connections to capital as well as overseas market. Nigerians still get food to eat today essentially because we have millions of peasant farmers who are stuck to the only trade they possibly know and must farm whether they make profit or not. Egg is selling for N50 in certain parts of the country today because many middle class farmers who have gone into poultry, which is even far more profitable than crop farming, have abandoned the business because of the rising costs of inputs.

Let me tell you the truth, farming in Nigeria as presently undertaken, is not a profitable business. It is wiser, cheaper, and far more economical to get your money ready and buy foodstuffs to hoard and release when the prices are sky high than to actually go into farming.

During the last planting season, quality seed beans used to cost about N550 a mudu. As I am writing this, a mudu now costs N300 which retailers buy from farmers. If you calculate the cost of transportation to and fro your farm, the cost of clearing the land and tilling it, the cost of planting the seeds, the cost of weeding the farms to allow the plants to grow well, the cost of spraying the beans so that pests do not destroy them, the cost of spraying them with growth fertilisers so you can have a good yield, the cost of harvesting it, the cost of processing it, the cost of bagging them, the cost of transporting your produce to your storehouse, the cost of applying chemicals to preserve it from weevils, the cost of transporting it to the market, you will agree that you cannot recover your cost of selling your beans at the current rate of N300 per mudu even if we agree that the one mudu you bought at N550 last year may have given you about two and a half mudus later.

This explains why Nigerian farmers are perpetually poor and their status is not likely to improve any time soon unless we constitute a panel of knowledgeable and involved men and women who are mandated to look at agriculture in Nigeria and how it should better be organised as a profitable business for all concerned. I want to repeat for emphasis that apart from the big time farmers like former Heads of State, Generals Olusegun Obasanjo and Abdulsalami Abubakar, Admiral Murtala Nyako, and other rich farmers, who have the means, the machines and the markets abroad for their produce, no middle class man or woman who produces food for the domestic market can make it.

It is desirable that citizens should get food to eat at affordable (not cheap) prices. What happens in other lands is that government comes in to ensure that. It will have a mechanism for buying food at fairly reasonable/ profitable prices from farmers and sell at subsidised/affordable rates to the citizens. This way, all concerned are happy. The government is happy that it does not have to contend with hungry and angry citizens; the citizens are happy that it has a caring and concerned government and farmers are happy and feel incentivised to continue to produce more or else the food security of a country is mortgaged. If things continue the way they are in Nigeria today, many who have gone into farming expecting to make something from it will surely beat a quick retreat and live a life of idleness. And if that happens, we will no longer be complaining about the high cost of food but about not seeing food to buy at all at any cost! That will be a disaster.

The Osinbajo task force should not try to demonise farmers, the middle men or anyone else involved in the food production, distribution or manufacturing chain. Rather, what is missing in our agriculture is government. I believe that government should step in big and boldly into our agriculture and organise it to be practiced as a profitable business. What to do are so many that I cannot seek to itemise them here. But one thing I think must be done urgently is that the government should seek out a former Peruvian diplomat turned ‘’public economist’’ called Hernando de Soto Polar. We direly need the expertise of his consultancy outfit which has helped many nations, to come help us organise our agriculture. As things stand today in our country, agriculture is on auto-pilot and it should not be so. A big hand must organise and guide it because otherwise, we are courting a national security challenge that will be in far greater ferocity than Boko Haram, Niger Delta insurgency and IPOB combined.

If hungry people across the country unite in their fury against government, dissolving their differences in faith and region and ethnicity, where can government hide from such a hungry horde? I am a great fan of Hon. Patrick Obahiagbon and would want to say in his manner that if Osinbajo Task Force on Food Prices is allowed to take measures to reduce food prices to the detriment of Nigerian farmers, ‘’The enormity of their crinkun crankun will bring about Armageddonrial end to food crop farming in Nigeria and that would mark the death nail on the coffin of the fiscal polistikum edificacy of the Nigerian nation’’.

In many conferences on farming in our country, many presenters and keynote speakers often choose to present a sexy, glamourous picture of agriculture. The reality on ground is otherwise. Agriculture in Nigeria is great torture with no gain.