As food prices continue to surge, as witnessed this year, food security challenges will continue to persist, further reducing African continent’s capacity to achieve zero hunger by 2030.
This prediction forms part of the 2023 Crop Production Report, released by AFEX – Africa’s leading commodities player – at the weekend, highlighting food insecurity and food inflation as a major challenge for Nigeria, with a 5.7 million metric tonne shortage across human consumption and agro-processing, and a historic high food inflation rate of 30.64 per cent.
Currently, Nigeria’s Global Hunger Index score remains alarmingly high, ranking 109th out of 125 countries, indicating a severe food security crisis.
The report appears to be in tandem with the recent forecast of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which predicted that in 2024, Nigeria is expected to see about 26.5 million people grappling with high level of food insecurity.
The FAO Country Representative, Dominique Kouacou, disclosed this at the presentation of the October to November round of the Cadre Harmonise (CH) food security and early warning analysis in Abuja.
According to the crop production report, which captures insights on six key commodities –Maize, Paddy rice, Soybean, Sorghum, Cocoa, and Sesame – leverages farmer surveys and measurement of transaction-level data to track vital information across crop production, price performance, and market dynamics.
The report is expected to aid the understanding of the current food system, while providing stakeholders in the commodities market with intelligence to make data-driven trading decisions in the coming season.
It highlights a critical improvement in access to farmland for cultivation in crucial areas, also an increase in the usage of improved inputs, such as high-yielding seeds and fertilisers, compared to last season, which contributed to Maize and Paddy rice being forecasted to have a significantly higher production this season.
The report, however, revealed that input lending remains a major challenge today, with agriculture making up only 6.16 per cent of bank lending in 2022.
“On pricing, the report forecasts an increase in prices for all commodities on the basis of a general decline in production coupled with increasing demand across processing and exports. Paddy rice, which faced the most notable upswing in 2022/2023, partly due to increased flooding and the India rice ban that contributed to an increase of 34 per cent and a baseline pricing of N353,000/mt, which is expected to rise to N400,000/mt and projected to stabilise at N480,000 to N500,000/mt by Q3 2023,” the report read.
Speaking during the launch of the report, the President/CEO of AFEX Nigeria, Akinyinka Akintunde, said: “This year, we nearly doubled our sample size from 20,677 to 39,091 to get an accurate reflection of the current state of Agriculture production, and we found that we must take extra care to prioritise improvement in agricultural productivity for these farmers, and this is hinged on investing in the sector, and solving for infrastructure, logistics, and technology gaps.
“This transformation will substantially enhance food self-sufficiency and increase our ability to meet the nutritional and food security needs of a growing population, while also bolstering the economy through foreign exchange earnings.”
He noted that a recurring limitation for agriculture on the continent is a shortage of reliable data, which affects the availability of transparent pricing and limits, on the one hand, participation from the side of capital market operators and largely financial market players and on the other hand, farmers’ ability to negotiate equitable contracts for themselves.
Akintunde said the report attempts to build that gap by building a reliable data bank to promote market education and facilitate accurate trading decisions.
*Media Report