A recent report from the Nigerian Ministry of Agriculture predicts that at least 31.5 million Nigerians could face a food and nutrition crisis between June and August of this year. This sobering statistic highlights the severity of a food crisis that has been gradually worsening for the past few years. High prices for fruits and vegetables and reduced supplies in local markets are already evident as major staple foods disappear from the table. With most people struggling to make ends meet even in the best of times, this bodes bleak for the future of Nigeria.
The Federal Government is frantically throwing all its efforts at the problem. Among several interim measures to strengthen the country’s food security, the government has declared a 150-day duty-free import period for food items and suspended duties, tariffs, and taxes on the import of certain food items. With the country on the brink of a full-blown food crisis, the government has taken temporary measures such as limiting import tariffs and providing subsidies and incentives to local governments to grow their own food. However, it is still too early to judge the effectiveness of these efforts, as they are short-term solutions that may not sustainably solve the problem in the long run.
Climate change and associated extreme weather patterns are adversely affecting smallholder farmers across Nigeria.
The causes of Nigeria’s growing food insecurity are multifaceted, but are driven by the rapidly expanding impacts of climate change. This has resulted in a series of cascading circumstances. Climate change and associated extreme and unpredictable weather patterns are adversely affecting smallholder farmers across Nigeria. Irregular rainfall patterns over the past few years have led to extreme events of drought and flooding, severely impacting agricultural activities. In addition, the drying up of water sources such as Lake Chad in northern Nigeria has reduced irrigated agriculture during the dry season, further intensifying annual conflicts between herders and pastoralists. As a result, violent clashes between farmers and herders have become frequent in most rural areas of the north, sometimes resulting in deaths. The region, which is Nigeria’s breadbasket, is also plagued by high levels of insecurity due to cross-border banditry from the Sahel and neighboring countries, leading some farmers to abandon their farms, further reducing the agricultural labor force and reducing food production.
Nigeria’s agricultural infrastructure is entirely dependent on transport trucks to transport produce from farms to urban centres. The recent removal of government subsidies on petroleum products has caused logistics costs to rise to astronomical amounts. Moreover, truck drivers are often charged multiple taxes and tolls at state borders, making such transport expensive. Only a few farmers (mostly middlemen) can afford these expensive transports to deliver food to cities, and these additional costs are passed on to consumers. In other cases, poor logistics often results in a significant percentage of agricultural produce, especially fresh produce, rotting, resulting in huge post-harvest losses every year across Nigeria. As a result, everyday staples such as tomatoes and carrots, fruits and vegetables are disappearing from the tables of most urban dwellers in Nigeria.
A new future for urban agriculture
The severity of this problem is most keenly felt in cities, but the solutions may lie within them. In his 1898 book The Way of Peaceful Reformation of Tomorrow (later revised and republished in 1902 as Garden Cities of Tomorrow), Ebenezer Howard proposed a practical solution to the overcrowding and industrial pollution of Victorian cities by building self-sufficient suburban cities surrounded by farmland. Pre-colonial African towns were similarly surrounded by farmland, and most of their inhabitants were subsistence farmers. Even after urbanization began after independence, urban and peri-urban farms remained an important feature throughout African cities. City dwellers cultivated plots of land of various sizes, from backyard farms to plots occupying cul-de-sacs, and on peri-urban farms of a few hectares on the outskirts of cities, residents grew vegetables such as spinach, peppers, pumpkin leaves, and tomatoes. These provided most cities with a degree of self-sufficiency. Sadly, all of this has been lost to the mindless urbanization that has characterized the past half century.
In Nigeria, not a single city has integrated food systems into its urban fabric, but population growth, security, climate and economic challenges require new thinking to mitigate the effects of climate change and its impacts on food production. Urban agriculture offers us a lifeline. Big cities such as Abuja and Lagos have the potential to produce a quarter of their vegetable needs, which will enhance food security, lower prices and reduce carbon emissions. Growing food within cities eliminates expensive, cumbersome and carbon-intensive logistics and also provides organic food for residents. These efforts also create jobs, improve nutrition for local residents and improve their overall quality of life.
With 68% of the world’s population expected to live in urban areas by 2050, there is a growing global movement towards developing urban food systems. Several cities around the world offer replicable models for urban agriculture. Despite being a concrete jungle, Tokyo has integrated food production infrastructure within the city, making urban agriculture an ecologically and economically viable solution. Approximately 3.3% of the city’s land area is agricultural. More than 8,000 urban farms covering 35,000 hectares have been created in Havana and other Cuban cities. These efforts demonstrate the potential for growing food on a large scale within the city, which was a major factor in Cuba being able to mitigate the effects of sanctions in the 1990s. Paris, the most densely populated city in Europe, also aims to grow a significant portion of its food in and around the city, as demonstrated by the world’s largest urban farm at the top of the Parc des Expositions. Since Mayor Anne Hidalgo made this a priority, many farms have sprung up across the city.
A significant portion of food grown in rural areas ends up in urban areas. It therefore makes sense to consolidate food security within urban areas rather than relying entirely on rural subsistence farmers who are currently unable to meet the country’s food needs. There may be concerns about pollution and contamination, but these can be mitigated by zoning farms within designated green spaces and buffer zones throughout the city.
Urban agriculture also offers the opportunity to operate integrated food systems that reuse wastewater to irrigate agricultural land, at the same time reducing the urban heat island effect and utilising undeveloped land for agricultural activities. Urban farms also reduce the need for packaging and refrigeration and form an important part of cities’ climate adaptation and mitigation strategies. Farms help cool cities, reduce the heat island effect, minimise flood risk and manage stormwater.
Nigerian cities are urbanizing rapidly and their food systems need to evolve just as rapidly. Changing spatial and demographic patterns across cities are profoundly shaping food systems with implications for safety, security and health. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, at least 70% of the food produced globally will be consumed in urban areas. More focus on urban food issues is long overdue.
Nigeria’s broken food system is a social equity issue, with food insecurity disproportionately affecting the urban poor. This situation is likely to trigger civil unrest in the coming months, the signs of which are already visible. Urban agriculture offers the best guarantee to quickly and sustainably close this gap, leading to the development of sustainable and resilient cities. Urban authorities across Africa need to consider urban food systems as integral to contemporary placemaking. Responding adequately to the needs of city dwellers directly impacts their quality of life and overall well-being. Urban food value chains should not be left to chance but seen as a core aspect of placemaking and social equity.
Featured image from Farm Africa.
