Nigeria’s food insecurity crisis: a look at food politics
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14295/bjs.v2i6.332Keywords:
food insecurity, value chains, transformative food politics, food supply chain, food policiesAbstract
Food is a political matter which questions how food systems are constituted, how they change or do not change and who gains or loses while implicating power relations from the supreme to the ultimate consumer. The Nigerian food system does not produce enough food to feed everyone. With her increasing population comes the huge growing demand for affordable food, both among the rural and urban populations but the local agricultural productivity is low and inefficient. Due to this, Nigeria depends on food imports to meet the growing demand, and this has not only increased Nigeria’s food imports but has also become a norm, that it is preferred to import wheat, cereals, rice and milk among other things instead of deeply investing in our local agricultural farms, thus resulting in a substantial trade deficit for the agri-food sector and increasing the gap in the domestic food supply. Underinvestment in the agricultural sector has limited the development of agri-businesses and agricultural value chains in Nigeria. The low level of agricultural services is the major issue in Nigeria’s food value chains. And as the gap in domestic food supply becomes larger, Nigeria becomes more dependent on ‘cheap’ food imports to work as a quick fix to the food deficit which not only addresses the low agricultural productivity that keeps the deficit in place but also increases food adulteration and food fraud.
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