Nigeria confronting a severe food security crisis in arrears to the damaging activities of bandits who are not only destroying farms but also killing farmers.
A report by Bloomberg obtains how farmers are being killed by bandits while those who are lucky to escape are forced to abandon their farms and look for other means of survival.
The financial news media highlighted how a farmer in Katsina state, Abdullahi Hassan Wagini, was forced to abandon his farm after his escape from a bandit attack which left his neighbour dead and his cows stolen.
While Covid-19 is threatening food security, access to a reliable source of sustenance for a population, across the world, bandits attacks are making the situation worse in Nigeria.
Bloomberg stated that while farmers in the northern regions are being forced to abandon farming and take up new jobs, those who remain are increasingly having to contend with gangs seeking to extort money by holding people, land and livestock for ransom.
“The security situation is not favourable,” said Wagini who is a retired government employee.
“We are heading toward famine and starvation,” Niger state Governor Abubakar Sani Bello was also quoted to have said.
Banditry is also cutting production of rice which is Nigeria’s most-consumed grain.
In Kebbi state, the country’s rice-growing hub, many farmers have stopped going to their fields for fear of attacks, another farmer, Rikotu Isha, said.
Taken as a whole, tens of thousands of hectares or arable land destroyed or rendered unapproachable, hundreds of thousands of cattle and sheep rustled, and markets disturbed.
Apart from security, climate factor is another affecting Nigeria’s food insecurity.
Warming temperatures changed some once green northern fields into a desert amidst a lack of water supply.
Lake Chad, the major irrigation source in the north of Nigeria, lessened by 90% since the 1960s, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.
Flooding is one more issue looming Nigeria’s food security.
