Reduction in food prices fall, a mirage, says Madlion

Mr. Shedrack Madlion

A Kaduna based practicing farmer, Mr. Shedrack Madlion has described the Federal Government’s pronouncement on bringing down the prices of food stuff in two weeks as another statement of hope that was far from reality. He said this in an exclusive telephone chat with Food Farm News.

He said it was impossible for the government to achieve the proposed reduction in price within two weeks as Agric minister, Chief Audu Ogbeh’s announced in an exclusive recently in an interview with Leadership newspaper. 

He queried the scientific strategies that were in place to achieve the set goal and lamented the hardship Nigerians were facing as the inflation rate continues to skyrocket.

He described the statement of the minister as just mere hope that cannot translate to reality asking “how could a nation with an inadequate numbers of tractors, and declining 47% agricultural activities in the year 2016 and 2017 be able to checkmate high food prices in two week?”, adding “what magic did government want to perform to achieve the goal?”

Madlion said: “hope is not a strategy, and the absence of strategy in life is tragedy. The food requirement in Nigeria as at today has not been met by the government, this I can tell you. How will the price of food drop where the country do not have a functional 400,000 tractors? How will the food prices drop when there is decline of 47% in rural farmers’ participation in agricultural activities between 2016 and 2017? How would the price of food drop when 14 million children are in Internally Displaced Camps (IDPs) doing no farming activities as they have not been properly settled down. I am talking of those people in the North East. How can the price of food drop when roads network and rural feeder roads are still the same since the 1967 and the 1980s without any addition? So, by the pronouncement of the Minister of Agriculture, Nigerians should ask what the strategies are for the food price fall when army worm has ravaged many maize farms as maize is being imported to fill the short fall of 10 million metric tons of 25 million so as to meet the national demand of 35 million metric tons”

The Kaduna based farmer said with the empty national silos; the failure of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN)’s anchor borrower programme; the driving away of Benue farmers from farms and unverified success recorded by Lagos and Kebbi states in the Lake Rice projects, it would be impossible to reduce food prices saying “the anchor programme is a failure. Ask Lagos state how many paddy of rice she got back in the Memorandum of Understanding signed on kebbi state rice”

 He added: “A basket of tomato in Port Harcourt is N16,400.00 in Ibadan N14,300.00; Mile 12,Lagos, N17.500.00, and in Kano, N12.000.00; while a tuber of yam in Kaduna is  N530.00, Bida, Niger state N210.00, Port Harcourt is N1,200.00”

He noted that many lives had been lost to farmers/herdsmen clashes and rustlers attack alongside kidnapping of people from the farms for ransom, which had taken a declining toll on the production capacity of food crops.