Experts chorus state-owned food silos

By Seye Adeniyi - Updated: Tuesday 02-06-2009

Government should help farmers to
guide against food wastages.THE food crisis in the country is get ting worse and biting harder on citiznery to the extent that many parents can only ask their children whether they have eaten and not whether they are satisfied with the meal given or provided.

For example, a kongo measure of rice is now over N300.00, while garri is over N250.00. Yet, the prices of these foods and other staples are still moving up. People are complaining seriously about hunger while many households are struggling to eat. Then one is forced to ask: where are we heading to?

This is also the question on the lips of many Nigerians and agricultural experts. However, a professor of agriculture, John Ademola Oluokun, has critically assessed the persisting global food crisis which has led not only to the scarcity of some food items across the globe, but which has also triggered astronomical increase in the prices of food commodities in the country and has therefore preoferred some ways out of the lingering problems.

Speaking with Tribune Agriculture recently in his office in Ibadan, the senior agriculture researcher explained that apart from the fact that we have more of political, newspaper farmers in the country more than the practising farmers, a situation which has not encouraged the abundant production of foods in the country; adding that the few practising farmers in the country do not even have free access to farm inputs and other subsidised agricultural equipment and materials like fertilizers, hybrid and early-maturing, disease-resistance seeds, etc, unlike the political farmers, who are very close to the government, thus enjoying what the real practising farmers ought to get without struggling in order to make food surplus in the country.

The don at the Institute of Agriculture, Research and Training (IAR&T), Apata, Ibadan, Oyo State, further stated that Nigeria may continue to experience food crisis and high food prices manifesting in continuous high food prices until right things are done or drastic steps to address the problems contributing to food shortage are taken. He went to stress that there are some simple steps or basic things which the Federal Government can quickly embark upon which many agricultural experts have been emphasising on for a long time, but which the government seemed not to be giving serious attention to.

Asked to mention some ways out of the present food scarcity and high food prices, Prof. Oluokun who is also the south-west zonal co-ordinator of REFILS, said apart from taking appropriate steps at ensuring that adequate fund is released for agricultural research, proper funding of agricultural and research institutes, liberalisation of the down stream sector of the country and using the profits made from the oil sector to finance agricultural development and projects, every state of the federation should also be mandated to have their own food storage facilities, that is, modern silos in order to cushion the lingering effects of incessant food scarcity and high food prices.

On how to implement his suggestions, Oluokun said every state in the country should buy excess agricultural produce from farmers in their states during the harvest period and such produces should be stored in state-built silos and preserved well for future purposes.

In addition, since many farmers are complaining about local governments chairmen insensitivity to their problems, the Federal Government should mandate every local government council in the country to have its own modern silos for the storage of excess agricultural produce which they must buy from farmers during the harvest period, adding that certain percentage of their monthly allocation should also be set aside for visible agricultural programmes/projects. He also frowned at the fake newspapers projects which many councils bosses are advertising for people to see.

If all these can be done, before we know it, prices of food would come down, there would be abundant food supply at the local government level, and this will also increase people’s interest in agriculture. This is what countries like the United States of America (USA), China, Japan, are doing and they are able to feed not only their people, but other countries of the world”, he stated.