ACHIEVING FOOD SECURITY IN NIGERIA, HOW FAR HAVE THE VARIOUS AGRICULTURAL POLICIES HELPED

Lawal, A. I. and Ahmed, Ayodele Victor and Babalola, Kehinde Leke (2015) ACHIEVING FOOD SECURITY IN NIGERIA, HOW FAR HAVE THE VARIOUS AGRICULTURAL POLICIES HELPED. In: Proceedings of the 18th Annual Symposium of the International Association of Research Scholars and Fellow, 23-24 March, 2015, The International Conference Centre, IITA, Ibadan, Nigeria..

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Abstract

At the heartbeat of any serious government both in the developed and emerging economies lies achieving food security in its totality. Food security essentially entails achieving food availability, food accessibility and food adequacy both in the appropriate quality and quantity to service the need of every individual in a nation. Literature has shown that over one billion people are faced with food insecurity problem worldwide with Africa having over six hundred million of her people faced with undernourishment, and Nigeria scoring more the 15 points in the Global Hunger Index scores. This points to the persistent danger of facing food insecurity on the continent as a whole and, Nigeria in particular. Government at various levels at different time in Nigeria have put in place various policies and programmes that aimed at combating food crisis and achieving food security, some of these policies includes Green Revolution, Operation Feed the Nation, establishment of River Basins, Commodity and Grain Boards, Agricultural Development Programmes, Public – Private participation initiatives, Fadama Projects, among others. The questions are: do these policies and programmes substantively increase food security in Nigeria? What policy or programmes helped achieve increase in food production in Nigeria? Answering these questions is important to virtually all the stakeholders in the economy especially the policy makers and practitioners. For policy makers on the one hand, the answers will identify the most effective way(s) of achieving food security in Nigeria which will further improve policy formulation for the practitioners. Besides, the response to the questions will aid developing strategies that will help fit into the various policies of the government in achieving food security, thus maximize the benefits embedded in them. The essence of this study is to use non-parametric statistical tool to examine the impact of the various agricultural policies and programmes in Nigeria in achieving food security. The paper also intends to contribute to the theoretical framework that will aid the formulation of effective all compassing agricultural policies which aimed at achieving food security in Nigeria.

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