Food Security and Climbing Food Prices in Nigeria - Coursework Example

GLOBAL FOOD SECURITY: HOW FOOD SECURITY BEING GOVERNED IN NIGERIA? (FOCUS ON RISING FOOD PRICES) Introduction Food security has been studied extensively in recent years. Moreover, it has become a global issue today, because plenty of governments still have not managed to resolve it. In particular, Rayfuse and Weisfelt state that it is quite challenging to guarantee enough safe food amount for people in the circumstances of global food crisis,1 especially in the case of low-income countries. Today, there are more than 805 million people extremely undernourished from 2012 up to 2014.2 Among the most affected regions, 54 percent of people in Africa do not have enough healthy food.3 In general, these data illustratively prove that global food security is rated as a global issue. In the given situation, the case of Nigeria is illustrative, as it is one of low-income countries situated in Africa and it suffers from the lack of food security. In this context, securing upcoming food is now considered a nation’s priority in this country. In the opinion of the World Bank, Nigeria is one of the poorest countries that experiences poverty, hunger, famine and malnutrition problems resulting from not have enough healthy food to consume.4 Because of this, the given essay analyses the appearance of food crisis in Nigeria and investigates how both international organizations and national leaders face this challenge. This essay is divided in three parts. The first one discusses the methodology to analysis of food security and the situation with it in Nigeria. The second considers the specific role of international actors (the World Bank, United Nations and WTO) in assisting this situation. The last one evaluates the shortcomings and relevance of their incentives in current political environment in Nigeria. 1. Food Security and Climbing Food Prices in Nigeria To start with, the fact that most countries are preoccupied with solving food security issue puts methodological difficulties on the investigation of this problem. Among the key factors that affect food security, scholars mostly concentrate on its price and the level of access to it. In other words, the adequate level of food security means that it is hard for a certain country to ensure that people get enough access to healthy food. For this purpose, this essay uses the definition of food security as the amount food accessed by people in their own country. Precisely, food security is defined as food that exists at all adequate times with the right amount that can meet their dietary needs for a healthy lifestyle.5 In the context of this discussion, this essay emphasises food prices rather than food availability. In fact, food availability is not the only problem of food security.6 In fact, the problem rather lies in the inability of the poor to buy food at affordable prices. In this context, food price affects its availability. Even though the food stocks are available to access, when the prices are high, people with low incomes are not able to buy it.7 Although, Nigeria as a country has access to food, but it is not available to anyone in this country. Thus, Nigeria is far from being completely food secured. The food prices are climbing and possibly the effect is not equally being felt, especially in the circumstances of global crises. Consequently, the rising food prices lead to the problems of food security, because not everyone makes an effort to buy food when the prices increase. In this situation, poor household families definitely would not make an effort to buy the same nutritional food as rich household families would. Nevertheless, the food is still available for all of them on the local market. Concerning the global context of rising food value, prices for staple foods have doubled in the recent years; moreover, these increases were mostly unexpected for global community.8 Because of this, it is particularly hard on the poor and near-poor people in developing countries to predict and meet these changes accordingly.9 In the given circumstances, the situation has both national and international dimension. While the price policy is the concern of government’s involvement (for instance, through the subsidies), international tariffs and trade policies also influence the price of imports and exports globally.10 Moreover, the financial crisis of 2008 led to the emergence of dramatic food prices for the whole nations11 and turned this difficulty into a burden on the economies of already low-income economies in the world.12 In other words, the problem of food prices is affecting all the countries in the world, but the severity of it differs in different regions. Above all, this crisis affects low-income countries like Nigeria, where food prices are dramatically climbing. In the given circumstances, international reaction is important. In general, the impact of food price increases on the majority of population in the developed and developing countries is different. In this context, food prices and energy prices are linked through production costs, and this combination has an implication on the extent of food prices in the future.13 In other words, biofuels, which are in demand, and direct food prices will increase because of the transportation costs of imports and exports. Consequently, low-income countries are most affected by rising food prices, since they hardly manage to cover all the additional costs at their higher price. In addition, in each country the poor in rural and urban areas are dependent on the market to buy food, as they spend most of their income on buying food.14 Hence, absence of food security in Nigeria means high food price and low food availability, especially in the case of low-income social groups in this country. Consequently, it cannot not manage this problem without foreign help. 2. The role of the international actors In response to above-mentioned problems, the developed nations need to formulate a strategy to make sure the food security problem can be tackled and can be reduced before the results of food prices automatically affect poor countries. For this aim, the roles of the World Bank, United Nations and WTO are crucial, since the problem is closely linked to financial, humanitarian, and economic issues. In general, it is evident that international organizations acknowledge the food problem in Nigeria on the highest level. In this context, the two main dimensions are agriculture and education. Concerning the nutrition sector, the role of United Nations is to analyse the undernourishment and poverty through numerous indicators, including infrastructural and economic criteria (like access to water resources and role of imports).15 In addition, the World Bank participates in the UN’s programmes and contributions helped the international society to conduct several programmes.16 Among them, the International Financial Corporation (IFC) of the World Bank has initiated various programmes for lending to the private sector, including the arrangement of a private sector for a planned Global Agriculture Price Risk Management Facility. However, the implementations still have weaknesses and Nigeria is still in crisis. In this context, the specific role of WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture by providing flexibility enabled food manipulations to increase in practice.17 In particular, it does not recognize the current economic inequality in the contemporary global system, which increases food insecurity in countries like Nigeria. Moreover, if there was fairness in how the government distributed the aid and money, it would definitely become possible to reduce the food security and poverty in this country. On the contrary, statistics in recent times on Nigeria show that between 26,500 – 30,000 children have died each day due to this problem.18 In addition, the effect of this is that the region has suffered from the absence of investment that is related to developments in agriculture equipment particularly with the phasing out of World Bank loans and counterpart funding from the Federal Government to the Agricultural Development Programmes. Even though all the international organizations have provided several strategies to make sure of the sustainable progress of the country, the money given by the World Bank was not enough to support the amount of food security in this country. To attain their goals, the World Bank and United Nations need to implement more food aid programmes, provide more subsidies and incentives to eradicate the poverty in Nigeria. This is the result of food price rises.19 In addition, education programmes in Nigeria are a concern for the world. In fact, it is a common belief that without proper knowledge and education this crisis will be protracted. Hence, by making investments in the food aid programmes, this institution needs to invest more money in education development for the poor. In addition, one of the aims of created by United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDG) is to provide education for every citizen (whether children or farmers) in the long-term perspective.20 Moreover, the World Bank Group works on reducing poverty through several projects.21 However, these goals are rather proclaiming, and current real affords in this sphere are questionable. In practice, many children dropped out from school because of the discouragement from budgets, physical risk and failure to improve.22 Nevertheless, the problem should be faced, since education is important for economic growth and increases the awareness of future crises in any country. Moreover, the informal educational programmes to small-scale farmers launched by both UN and the World Bank are important and directly assist the poor people with funds. As a result, Nigerians simply will have an opportunity to for the future shock prices. If there is lack of knowledge, the country will become poorer because there will be no improvement from their citizens. If to pay enough attention to education, it will surely engage Nigerians in farming and trading benefits from the incentives from the United Nations and the World Bank.23 In short, even though the World Bank, United Nations and WTO acknowledge the importance to meet Nigerian difficulties in food security, the ineffectiveness of these incentives’ implementation is evident. Currently, the goals to eradicate poverty and hunger in Nigeria still reflects negatively. 3. The Role of the State and the Politicians in the Problem The government of Nigeria is one of the important actors in the global food security problem to make sure sustainable development can be accomplished in their own country. They have collaborated with the international governmental organizations in the private sector to resolve the issue; in addition, they tried to reduce the amount of people who experience food security. Notwithstanding this, corruption is an essential part of the political system in Nigeria.24 Because of this, the state government still needs to maintain the economic growth in their own country, and the effectiveness of its work can be evaluated by the number of the poor (absent of dietary foods) in Nigeria which is currently recorded as high. Among the key factors that led Nigeria to suffer from complicated food security situation, the absence of good governance was the reason that led to this problem. In the circumstances of corrupted environment,25 Nigerian poor had lost hope to change the situation for their families. In other words, when they were concerned of food shortage, the fact that government did not consider it as a problem led to the inadequate understanding of this problem. Moreover, the corrupted way of governing usually leads to even wider range of issues to appear. As Domenech, the writer of The Federalist, states, “In so many of the areas where we’re seeing price inflation, government policy is contributing to the trend line, raising the costs not just of food, but of education, health care, energy, and housing, and putting pressure which multiplies for those with kids. All it takes is a willingness to go after those policies, and for a few smart politicians to start rejecting the priorities of the boardroom table in favour of the kitchen table.”26 In other words, the unwillingness of Nigerian government to change the situation led to even more problems in this country. And so, the improper governing was among the key factors in Nigerian food security problem. In the given circumstances, the donations provided by the World Bank to Nigeria are divided in the wrong way. Precisely, the government mismanaged the public funds that they received from the donor organisations.27 In these circumstances, the upper management collects most of the money poor people are supposed to receive. Therefore, country’s responses to food crises significantly depend on governmental as well as international forces. To date, corruption is the curse of justice, self-governing stability and socio-economic and political development in Nigeria.28 Thus, the question of how effectively and fairly does the government implement the World Bank and United Nations measures for economic development of their country seems more important than the role of this international institution itself. Conclusion In order to sum up, it is evident that Nigeria is a country that faced global financial crisis and food prices increase with the severe problems in its national food security. In fact, the most vulnerable group in this low-income country are poor people. In the given circumstances, the food insecurity results in expensive food not in the limited access to it for the whole country. Thus, international institutions created several strategies in order to face such challenges. In this context, United Nations launched numerous programs supported by the World Bank, which acknowledge poverty and necessity to reform both nutrition and education sectors. In this context, thee investments are needed for Nigeria in order to eradicate effectively food security in this country. Nevertheless, all these efforts will be useless with no cooperation from the government. In this context, current inability of Nigerian government to be transparent to their people and distribute the wealth accordingly is the main obstacle for the implementation of the United Nations and the World Bank’s incentives. In addition, current agricultural agreements in WTO empower global inequality between the developing and the developed countries, which complicates the situation for Nigerian governors. So, Nigerian case shows that unequal distributions of wealth and existence of politicians who monopolise the industries makes it hard for the World Bank to achieve set by the United Nations MDGs and end the problem with the lack of food security. Works Cited Domenech B. (2014). Food Prices Are Soaring And Washington Doesn’t Care. The Federalist. Available online: http://thefederalist.com/2014/07/08/food-prices-are-soaring-and-washington-doesnt-care/ (accessed 27.02.2015) Elijah O. (2010). Global Food Price Increases and Nutritional Status of Nigerians: The Determinants, Coping Strategies, Policy Responses and Implications. Vol 5, No 2. (ARPN). FAO (2005). The Food Policy, Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. 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