The Federal Government has said that farmers in Nigeria went bankrupt as a result of the hardships they faced from December 15, 2022, to February 20, 2023, when the Supreme Court decided against the former Central Bank governor’s naira redesign strategy.
This was said by Senator Abubakar Kyari, the Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, during his defense of the ministry’s 2024 budget during his Monday appearance in Abuja before the Joint Senate and Representatives Committee on Agriculture.
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According to the minister, the goal of the 2024 budget is to attain food security and close the gaps left by the financial difficulties that have impacted the nation’s food production.
Kyari identified factors, including insecurity, the naira re-design policy and farmer-herder clashes, as responsible for the impoverishment of farmers, which severely threatened food security in the country.
He said: “The cash crunch caused by the naira re-design made most of the farmers sell their farm produce at giveaway prices for survival since buyers couldn’t access cash to buy the produce from them. The policy, which coincided with the harvest season, ended up rendering the farmers empty financially.”
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Speaking separately, Dahiru Ismaila Haruna, representing Toro Federal Constituency in Bauchi State and Ademorin Kuye, from Shomolu Federal Constituency in Lagos State, raised the alarm on the urgent need by the federal government to address the high rate of hunger in the country before things get out of hand.
Haruna said: “Hon. Minister, being from the North East, the picture I’m about to paint shouldn’t be strange to you at all—the pathetic picture of people dying of hunger daily while the majority of those surviving feed once a day.”
The lawmaker revealed that available foods in the country are being mopped up by people from neighbouring countries, insisting that the development has become very dangerous for Nigerians.
Speaking further, the minister reminded lawmakers that food security is number one on the eight-point agenda of President Bola Tinubu’s administration and that the ministry has repositioned itself for the actualisation of the agenda.
Earlier in his submission, he told the committee members that for the 2024 fiscal year, a total of N362.940 billion was earmarked for the sector, out of which N124.1 billion was for the ministry.
The breakdown of the N124.1 billion, according to him, shows that N10.6 billion is for personnel cost, N1.34 billion for overhead and N112.497 billion for capital expenditure.
The Senate committee chairman, Saliu Mustapha, and other members of the committee decried the high level of hunger and famine in the country, which, they said, resulted in the deaths of some poor people in rural areas.
