While Nigerians are discussing in the media and everywhere else about an alleged looming food scarcity or famine, and loudly complaining about the increasing value of foodstuff at the point of purchase, the European Union (EU) is solving the problem by adding migratory locust, the type agriculturists here call pest, to their food variety.
The European Commission announced that migratory locust or grasshoppers as a human food “could be marketed as a snack or as a food ingredient either in dried or frozen form with wings and legs removed.” It is also sold without the legs and wings in Nigeria, although consumers can opt for the one with legs and wings, which is equally available. The authorisation to use locust as food in the EU zone will become into force on December 5th, 2021.
Back home, locust has always been a regular food in parts of the country. It is commonly available in the food sections of markets in Sokoto, Birnin Kebbi, Katsina, Maiduguri, Potiskum, Kano, for example. Fried and roasted grasshoppers are bought by families and used as ingredients to prepare nutritiously delicious soups.
A writer for the food and drink column of “Modern Farmer,” an online publication, said: “Migratory locusts, like many other species of grasshopper and cricket, are pretty widely eaten; this particular species has long been a part of diets in parts of Zambia, Cameroon, Botswana and several other countries in central and southern Africa, as well as in some Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand and the Philippines. They’re also quite tasty, described as being similar to other grasshoppers in flavor, a little bit nutty and savory.”
So as the Europeans turn to grasshoppers for food, Nigerians should consider themselves lucky in the sheer variety of sources of protein available and accessible to them regardless of the season of the year in the country. Roots and tubers are which are nutritious, affordable and accessible, are available in all parts of the country, though their prices are gradually inching upward.
The main roots and tubers from each of which numerous dishes are derived include cassava, the king of crops. Its other siblings are cocoyam, sweet potatoe, Irish potatoe and yam. These human foods are plentiful all over Nigeria. None of these stable Nigerian food items is imported. And this fact is a plus for our country.
Grains and cereals are equally abundant, accessible, and affordable. The stable grains and cereals are sorghum, maize, millet, wheat, rice, aca and more. It is doubtless that the prices for the assorted grains are inching upward, nearly simultaneously, as if synchronised, with those for tubers and roots.
There are many factors pushing up the prices: the banditry in the grains production belt of the country; communal conflicts in the the main roots and tubers production zones, especially the much-hyped, but obviously induced antagonism between farmers and nomadic cattle rearers, and the ebbing insurgency in portions of the North East.
Whole farming towns and villages have been destroyed by insurgents and bandits, or deserted in the aftermath of unprofitable communal conflicts. With a large swathe of farmlands that were left fallow by run-away owners; or farmers killed in conflicts, it is not surprising that a gap was created in food production. Thankfully, it is not as wide a gap as it is generally assumed. The bottomline is that there will be no famine in Nigeria, although economists say scarcity and panicky demand for commodities often lead to higher prices for such commodities.
True, the observed early cecession of rainfall in parts of the North Eastern and North Western geopolitical zones caused a mild drought in the 2021 wet season that withered late beans, sorghum, groundnut, rice, tomatoes and okra. But that posed no threat of pushing Nigeria into famine.
Most consumers rarely include the soaring cost of transporting foodstuff from the producing areas to the centres of consumption as a factor pushing food prices northwards. The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has reported that the cost of transporting food produced in the North to South is mainly responsible for the higher food prices in the South relative to the northern part of the country.
Many commentators on food and food prices of recent were unmindful of the cost of certified seeds, pesticides, planting materials, fertilisers, harvesting, sorting, dehusking and bagging, storage and general post-harvest handling as some of the elements that push up the prices of foodstuff.
An additional driver of food prices in our country is the fact that Nigeria contributes in feeding some of our neighboughs: Chad, Cameroon, Sudan, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Republic of Niger and Burkina Faso, to mention only the main beneficiaries. Dozens of trucks daily depart the country’s several huge food markets ladened with foodstuff to these countries. Ironically the foodstuff we say are costly here are considered cheap and snapped up in those countries at higher prices.
African countries are not the only beneficiaries of buying food from Nigeria. The country officially exports sesame seeds, soya beans, white beans and cassava chips to China, India and Singapore.
Don’t be suprised that, “Nigeria exports agricultural products like cocoa beans, cashew nuts in shell, frozen shrimps, ginger, fish, crustaceans, mollusks, aquatic invertebrates, oilseed, grain, seed and fruits to the Netherlands,” the Netherlands agro group which organises food imports from Nigeria said at https://www.agroberichtenbuitenland.nl/.
Nigeria also exports smoked fish, garri, beans flour, melon seed, ogbono, cassava flour, bitter leaf, dried pumpkin leaf, palm wine, processed coconut, pepper, tomato paste, hibiscus flower, yoghurt, other vegetable leaves and hot chilli pepper to many countries in the world.
Given the circumstances, how do we stem the slow-rising prices of foodstuff? Simple: as many semi-idlers in the cities as possible should embrace agriculture to produce more food and waste less of it.
Dambatta writes via [email protected]
