Nexus of security and farming

Adewole Adebayo, presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party, wants to reduce petrol prices by tweaking the foreign exchange rate at which the naira is converted to the American dollar, the major currency of international trade.

Adebayo might succeed in reducing the high cost of living if he can tweak the foreign exchange rate to make the naira stronger. But didn’t exactly explain how he would achieve that feat, and neither does he appear to appreciate that the nearly $54bn foreign reserves that President Bola Tinubu has accumulated are not absolute.

The traditional demand of double-entry accounting, the debit and credit, dictates that payments for imports would eventually reduce the gross reserves accumulated mainly from exports and, in turn, depreciate the value of the naira.

The most practical approach to reducing the naira’s foreign exchange rate is to ensure that nearly all Nigeria’s most strategic consumer goods, like food, medicines, clothing, housing materials, and petroleum products, are produced locally.

Some argue that if all Nigerian governments, federal, state and municipal, can motivate Nigerian farmers to at least produce food for all Nigerians and thus reduce the demand for foreign exchange, the exchange rate will significantly go down.

A recent upsetting trend is that Nigeria, which used to be the biggest exporter of palm oil to the rest of the world, now imports the same commodity from three West African countries: Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, and Ghana.

In addition, Nigeria shamelessly imports processed palm oil from Asian nations, one of which is reported to have come in the 1960s to learn the secrets of propagating oil palm at the Nigeria Institute for Oil Palm Research, Benin.

Already, Nigerians can see the reduction (and relative stability) of the foreign rate after the Dangote Refinery began producing petroleum products locally and paying naira for the crude petroleum supplied by the Nigeria National Petroleum Company Limited.

Previous records of the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics showed that in the first quarter of 2025, the year-on-year decline in the importation of petroleum products was a significant 54 per cent, from N3.81tn in 2024 to N1.76tn.

But after the economic saboteurs within Nigeria’s petroleum sector compromised the President’s plan to sell crude petroleum to Dangote Refinery in exchange for the naira, recent data from the NBS show a surge in the bill for imported petroleum products by 989.4 per cent, from N87.40 billion in the first quarter of 2026, to N952.15bn in the second quarter.

However, t the direct effect of the reduction in the import bill of food products cannot be lost even in the maze of the willful rascality of the denizens of the upstream and downstream sub-sectors of Nigeria’s petroleum sector.

In 1960, before Nigerians became lazy after acquiring a taste for foreign food, Nigeria only imported roughly 10 per cent of its food needs, which would have been processed food for the expatriate community and Nigeria’s domestic nouveaux riche.

According to data from the Central Bank of Nigeria, the total bill of food imports into Nigeria in 2025 was N7.6 trillion, or 11.8 per cent, of total imports, a drop from 16.3 per cent in 2024. That amounted to 4.97 per cent of total foreign exchange use.

But for proper perspective, it is important to point out that in 1960, agriculture contributed somewhere between 60 and 63 per cent of Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product, 80 per cent of foreign earnings and about 90 per cent of the labour force.

But year-to-date figures in 2026 showed that the story of agriculture had changed to an insignificant proportion, whereby agriculture only provides somewhere 24-25 per cent of the GDP, 3.89 to 5.5 per cent of foreign earnings and employs roughly 35 to 40 per cent of workers.

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Though some people argue that the, albeit limited, adoption of mechanised farming may have reduced the number of manpower that are engaged in the farming sector of Nigeria, there is no doubt that the high level of insecurity in the rural farming communities has driven many away from farming.

Low agricultural production in recent years has been attributed to insecurity that has disrupted farming and the supply chain, as roads have become unsafe. This has reduced food and cash crop production, leading to scarcity across the country in 2025.

According to Abdulaziz Mala, a security analyst with experience in the Lake Chad area where Boko Haram insurgents still hold sway, “Insecurity disrupts all pillars of food security, such as availability, access, utilisation and stability.”

At least 1 million Nigerian children are at risk of severe and acute malnutrition because of the instability in the insurgents-infested Northeast corridor of Nigeria. It is not so surprising to learn that shortage of food compromised the health of kids from poor homes in that region by as much as 57 per cent.

According to Nigeria Health Watch, between 2018 and 2024, Nigeria recorded an estimated 14,000 cases of armed violence in the rural areas where farms are located. The negative impact of this on food production is that Nigeria ranked 115th out of 123 countries in the world.

This has led the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation to come to the conclusion that during the lean season of 2025, food and nutrition insecurity in Nigeria confronted about 31 million poor Nigerians.

Mala concluded that the kidnappings and banditry, especially in many parts of Northern Nigeria, “have been the main drivers of food insecurity nationwide, as it also disrupts major agricultural trade routes”. He adds that in the North-Central region of Nigeria, where there were farmer-herder clashes, about 94.2 per cent of farmers abandoned their farms because of fear of attacks.

Those who wrote Section 14(2b), which provides that “the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government”, into Nigeria’s 1999 Constitution, must have the insight that there is truly a nexus between security and the welfare of the people.

So, if the government truly recognises this nexus, it should find a way to secure the communities that grow the food and cash crops that will not only provide food for the people, raw materials for local agro-allied industries and for export but also strengthen the naira’s foreign exchange rate by conserving the foreign reserves of the country.

The government should pay particular attention to Northern Nigeria, reputed to be Nigeria’s agriculture hub, though it is experiencing the most violent insecurity, which directly undermines the nation’s food security and overall economic development. Farming in Southern Nigeria too is becoming a dangerous enterprise with sporadic attacks by violent marauders.

Some security measures the government must take include rapidly expanding and deploying Forest Guards equipped with modern weapons and gadgets, and urging the National Assembly to speed up the constitutional amendments for the creation of state police.

By the way, the creation of four additional divisions by President Tinubu is commendable. He should create more so that the army will provide swifter responses to distress calls if rural farmers are attacked by terrorists, insurgents, kidnappers and marauding cattle herders.