Global Food Crisis: a Nigerian panacea

The absence of oryza sativa from the menu of most families of the world, is generating a farce about the true food situation in the world, especially in Nigeria. Did your eye brawl rise at oryza sativa? You are not alone. I had to squeeze mine, dig deep into my politics fogged mind to my secondary schools days. When I finally came up with oryza sativa, the botanical name for rice, I was grateful to my Agric Master. Simply known as Mr. Furrow. Furrow was given to him as a mark of respect for his insistence that your furrow must straight.The memory of Mr. Furrow resonated for two reasons. One, the dearth of rice from the tables of Nigerians and secondly the just released JAMB result.

The JAMB result as broken down on national television, showed that less than 3 percent of the jambites wanted to study Agriculture and a more miserable percentage wanted to study education. Why won’t the price of food hit the tip of the moon? Why won’t the quality of graduates be watery? I am happy that the highest score, did not go to any student that wanted to study Law, Medicine or Petrochemical engineering. (I shall get back to this) but humbly wants to study Geography.

This apathy towards agriculture at the university level is as a result of the multiplicity of private secondary/primary schools. These private schools (a good number though) do not have space for the children to develop as African children. Their natural instincts are confined to concrete prisons. These PS, do not have a farm. Agricultural science it thought courtesy of pictures on the pages of text books. The children do not feel the earth and watch a grain of corn spring up till the comb is yellow and inviting.

All the secondary schools I attended had land mass enough for each student to have a bed, do a ridge. Even at hostel level, each house maintained a farm and the proceeds of the farm were used to augment the food stuff from the general school pantry. We even tendered the garden and our continuous assessment was based on the health of our farm. Those who could not articulate very well in writing and rote, made up with practical.

A day within the week was set aside for agriculture. The dusty aroma of damp earth after the first yearly showers is a clarion call that the farming season is around. Akin to the agricultural day, is another day set aside for manual labour.

Not only did it give us blisters, it helped us build charater. We march out, brandishing cutlasses to engage in an unequal war with the typha elephantum and other members of the gramineae not fit for consumption and declared weed.

But what do we have now on the horizon of Nigerian educational landmass? Tall buildings and tiled floors with no space for common physical education. Asking for a land for farm, is like seeking a blade of grass from the face of sky. I wonder what are the criteria for awarding license to applicants for a private school.

Before the artificial food crisis becomes real in Nigeria, those saddled with the responsibility of training our children, should review the curriculum and make sure that practical agriculture takes a place of pride. Catch them young is a popular phrase and if truly implemented, these budding agriculturists will become the pillar of food production in Nigeria.

What we have in Nigeria, despite various policies on agriculture (Operation Feed the nation; Green Revolution; Back to Land; agricultural research institutions like FIRRO,IITA), is business agriculture. A businessman with no understanding of the difference between tractor and tractor-coupled equipment gets hectares of land with active connivance of his party members in Ministry of Land and plant seedlings that are not vector resistant. After a year of bad harvest, the land is turned into an estate or a hotel and that marks the end of “the biggest mechanized farm in Africa”

Another problem is the death of farmers’ co-operatives. Securing loan for agricultural endeavours, is like squeezing stone out of water. The banks would rather give you soft loan to buy a car, household items and other utility value-less appliances from USA than a loan for agriculture. When they do in other to fulfill all righteousness, the interest rate and collateral they demand can only be met by a politician who has embezzled public funds.

If the Yar’Adua administration is sincere about tackling the “food crisis”, she should invest the 40 billion naira earmarked for the importation of rice into the agricultural sector. After all its only an insignificant percentage of Nigerians have license to import rice.

If President Yar’Adua doesn’t know where to invest, let me show him. It doesn’t require a commission of party men. A good number of silos, granaries, ranches and research institutions are lying fallow in the North; the timber, coconut and cocoa farms in the West are dilapidated while the oil/raffia palms of the East have been reduced to chaff. The fisheries of the South-South have been bleached by the billows from the devil’s excreta.

Let’s save Nigeria before Nigerians will queue for leftover relief planes from Niger Republic.

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