Impact of Soaring Food Prices and Erratic rainfall on the 2024 Growing Season in Northern Nigeria: The way forward
Published 2024-07-06
Keywords
- Soaring,
- Food Prices,
- Erratic rainfall,
- 2024 growing Season,
- Northern Nigeria
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Copyright (c) 2024 African Journal of Environment and Sustainable Development
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Abstract
Nigeria was already in a serious food insecure situation prior to increases in the basic food prices that started in 2006. The increases in food prices has been a major source of worry and concern especially by the poor and vulnerable compared with other price shocks like high electricity tariffs, fuel and transport prices. The soaring food price is undermining government efforts on poverty reduction, food and nutrition security. It poses threat to humanitarian crisis, socio-economic, environmental, developmental, political and security-related challenges of millions of people. This study examines the soaring food price increases and erratic rainfall on the 2024 growing season and articulates its immediate and remote causes on food security of Northern Nigerians. For several months now, worldwide food prices and erratic rainfall has been experienced and is likely to have a detrimental impact on agricultural productivity in efficiency analysis. This has had severe impacts on many inhabitants of Northern Nigeria, ranging from increases in poverty and hunger and problems with inflation and balances of payment to national instabilities. The extreme price boom is likely to prove more short-term in character. However, there are a number of longer-term trends that appear to indicate a tendency toward food prices higher and more unstable than they have been in the past. While in the short term the ongoing food crisis is harmful to most urban and rural households, viewed in the longer-term perspective, higher prices have positive effects on the majority of rural households in Northern Nigeria, and thus on poverty as well, which continues to be a mainly rural phenomenon. Both governments and development policy are urgently called upon to adopt short-term measures, including an easing of import and export restrictions, provision of import or consumer credits, direct transfers, and, possibly, food aid, designed to quickly defuse situations that may often be explosive. But there is also a need for longer-term measures designed to promote agriculture in the North, on the one hand to boost output and thus to return food prices to tolerable levels and stabilize them and on the other hand to bolster rural economic cycles and sustainably raise the purchasing power of the rural population.