Intro

When thinking about national economic and social stability, food production comes to mind as a fundamental need and right. Government has a responsibility to create the conditions for producers to cultivate crops or rear animals on arable land and deliver produce to consumers or process them into other commodities, stimulating increased economic activity up the value chain.

Nigeria’s food and economic situation is currently highly unstable, as influenced by multiple factors including:

• Large base of small-holder farmer who have less resources to increase yield [3b]
• Low storage and transportation capacity leading to produce waste [3a]
• Dearth of modern facilities to manufacture processed goods [3c]
• Production for export to limited markets for a few high-value raw commodities, and do domestic consumption [?]

These factors perpetuate food insecurity by leaving the latent potential of Nigeria’s arable land unrealized. Tangibly speaking food insecurity affects community resilience, the ability for people to pay bills or stay on their land, and influences political instability including farmer-herder conflicts as well. [1]

On the other end of this, the approach to the economy embraced by the government contributes to larger “macro” factors that further worsens food insecurity [1a]. Some examples are:

• General corruption: government embezzlement, misappropriating farmers grants and limited accountability
• One-commodity dependency with oil: limited foreign exchange streams [1b]
• Low investment in education and science/technology: lack of industrialization (esp. rural) [3d]
• Insecurity: interstate roads are unsafe due to internal conflicts (fundamentalist insurgents, between nomadic cattle herders and sedentary farmers over land, kidnapping for ransom) [1a]

The common approaches to this revolve around foreign direct investment or public-private partnerships, towards industrial investments like providing inputs and tools to allow farmers grow more high-value produce at large volumes. These encourage a move to industrialized agriculture to further stimulate the economy via internal and export trade, but might also be neglected in favor of higher value export commodities or be prey to government/private-sector corruption. Insecurity compromises investment due to a high risk and unpredictable environment. Orthogonally, military interventions against insurgents can be ineffective against guerrilla warfare while becoming self-perpetuating war economies – this could be the subject of a different article. [?]

This article promotes alternatives that can fulfill the core objective of food security, while being more self-reliant and circumventing environmental damage that’s associated with industrial agriculture. This requires rethinking things like “cash” crops/crop diversity, land tenure, resource use & waste management — the system of alternative techniques described are commonly referred to as “Permaculture”.

Permaculture provides:

• Highly sustainable solutions with low capital investment [?]
• High pest resilience and fertility via crop diversity [?]
• Species and habitat restoration [?]