World Food Day Musings
I happen to be on the ‘big side’, not as a result of eating too much but as a result of my mother’s genes. I’ve tried so hard to control my size and weight and heard I have to watch my calories. But trust me, doing all the counting and all is really demanding. Then adjusting to my new job has been another challenge altogether. At my former job, there was a canteen with variety of food to choose from, rice and stew; jollof rice; salad or moi-moi; eba and native, okra, or vegetable soup. So there were options to pick from. I believe I ate healthy then. But now, the story is different.
There's no canteen for starters. The lady who prepares the meals has a lot on her hands as she serves as the tuck shop lady. So she’s not always available or just too busy to be disturbed. So most of the time, I go hungry. I’m even surprised at how my stomach and system has been able to manage without adequate food for weeks now. Sometimes I return home and binge on something I had bought on the way, be it oranges, biscuits or some junk food. There’s another lady who sells to the labourers at the contruction site close by, but reports have it that it is demeaning to be seen buying food from the lady who has her meals in coolers and buckets, inside a wheelbarrow. Hmm. Okpari o. So how man go do when hunger strike?
I manage to carry noodles or rush to buy bread and akara from another lady just outside the office premises but this must be done before 7.30am as getting into the premises anytime later that means you’re late to work. Mehn! Working for people can be stressful and even working for ones’ self can be daunting. You have to be fearless. With my 7.30am to 4pm job, running a business of my own seems impossible. Some weekends are also encrypted into the whole job requirement with events and stuff. So you just have to squeeze some time out for your personal runs and all.
So back to our food matter, I remember how the prices of food items skyrocketed recently due to the ‘so-called’ recession. I did several market surveys as a result of my former job and truth be told, people were really bitter with the current administration. They blamed and still blame President Muhammadu Buhari for everything going wrong. The price of petrol which is actually controlled by marketers (though the economic policies of the government have some role to play), the entire thing was put on the man’s head. I’m sure that some prayers made by the commoners resulted in the man’s sickness… (I didn’t say anything o). So the term ‘Buharieconomics” was birthed, a term that describes the harsh economic condition many persons had to reckon with. The price of garri, a staple food that a lot of Nigerians cannot do without was also placed on Buhari’s head. I visited my regular customer one day with the intention of buying some foodstuff, including garri. I was shocked when she told me a small Peak Milk cup cost N150. I asked what could have been the reason and your guess is as good as mine- BUHARI. “Na Buhari na”, was her answer. All the other factors responsible for the rising cost of the staple food were thrown in the gutters. For instance, Okwale community in Khana Local Government Area, one of the major garri producing communities in Rivers State has been in recent months ravaged by communal crises. Women were unable to harvest their cassava crops as at the time I started noticing the change in the price of garri. From firsthand report, women were beaten, raped, and their crops which serve as their major preoccupation harvested by hoodlums. Visiting Okwale then was a scary experience. The village was a ghost town with damaged building, shattered windows, etc. A church which had been turned into a refugee camp was also a central processing unit for all those who managed to harvest some of their cassava. Obviously, the processed product was for personal consumption as mass production was almost impossible for the teeming consumers in the city of Port Harcourt and its environs.
Then again, we had the issue of flooding across the state. Several farmlands were flooded with the heavy rains that characterized the weather in the state. People complained and complained and complained, but didn’t know what the farmers were going through. A basin of garri flew to N7000! Then I started wondering what the Ministry of Agriculture had been doing all over the years. Subsistent farming is never the way to ensure food security and stable price of goods in the market. I began to wonder if the exchange rate was beginning to affect the price of garri too, after all rice went up because we closed our borders to foreign rice. But no, it was as a result of insecurity and climate change, for dollar should in no way be responsible for the price of locally produced commodities. I began to wonder why we can’t and haven’t gone into full scale mechanized farming. Tractors would have done justice to the creation of ridges and proper tillage for those farms that needed them. What about the cooperatives? Couldn’t they buy tractors and lease them one farmer after the other?
We have so much to do as a people and start blaming ourselves for a lot of things that go wrong, things that could be easily avoidable by acquiring the right persons with the right specialty to solve specific problems. For instance, there’s a ‘mad’ agro-business expert I’ve met personally- Shedrach Madlion is his name. His ideas are tested and tried as he owns farmlands and is into exportation of agricultural products big time. Some government officials have employed him for projects and he’s making his cool cash. He has ideas concerning fruits and perishable goods where conditioning centres are set up for our fruits and perishables of which a huge percentage get spoilt and lost during transportation, usually from the North to other parts of the country.
So on this World Food Day, it is my prayer that those in authority begin to do the right thing and not just pay lip service to the people. Ministries of Agriculture must wake up from their slumber and adopt practical ways of ensuring that the methods of farming in these parts change. Government should also ensure that communities are safe for the continuous flow of the production process, and even encourage the processing and packaging aspects of agriculture, which are yet to be harnessed.
There's no canteen for starters. The lady who prepares the meals has a lot on her hands as she serves as the tuck shop lady. So she’s not always available or just too busy to be disturbed. So most of the time, I go hungry. I’m even surprised at how my stomach and system has been able to manage without adequate food for weeks now. Sometimes I return home and binge on something I had bought on the way, be it oranges, biscuits or some junk food. There’s another lady who sells to the labourers at the contruction site close by, but reports have it that it is demeaning to be seen buying food from the lady who has her meals in coolers and buckets, inside a wheelbarrow. Hmm. Okpari o. So how man go do when hunger strike?
I manage to carry noodles or rush to buy bread and akara from another lady just outside the office premises but this must be done before 7.30am as getting into the premises anytime later that means you’re late to work. Mehn! Working for people can be stressful and even working for ones’ self can be daunting. You have to be fearless. With my 7.30am to 4pm job, running a business of my own seems impossible. Some weekends are also encrypted into the whole job requirement with events and stuff. So you just have to squeeze some time out for your personal runs and all.
So back to our food matter, I remember how the prices of food items skyrocketed recently due to the ‘so-called’ recession. I did several market surveys as a result of my former job and truth be told, people were really bitter with the current administration. They blamed and still blame President Muhammadu Buhari for everything going wrong. The price of petrol which is actually controlled by marketers (though the economic policies of the government have some role to play), the entire thing was put on the man’s head. I’m sure that some prayers made by the commoners resulted in the man’s sickness… (I didn’t say anything o). So the term ‘Buharieconomics” was birthed, a term that describes the harsh economic condition many persons had to reckon with. The price of garri, a staple food that a lot of Nigerians cannot do without was also placed on Buhari’s head. I visited my regular customer one day with the intention of buying some foodstuff, including garri. I was shocked when she told me a small Peak Milk cup cost N150. I asked what could have been the reason and your guess is as good as mine- BUHARI. “Na Buhari na”, was her answer. All the other factors responsible for the rising cost of the staple food were thrown in the gutters. For instance, Okwale community in Khana Local Government Area, one of the major garri producing communities in Rivers State has been in recent months ravaged by communal crises. Women were unable to harvest their cassava crops as at the time I started noticing the change in the price of garri. From firsthand report, women were beaten, raped, and their crops which serve as their major preoccupation harvested by hoodlums. Visiting Okwale then was a scary experience. The village was a ghost town with damaged building, shattered windows, etc. A church which had been turned into a refugee camp was also a central processing unit for all those who managed to harvest some of their cassava. Obviously, the processed product was for personal consumption as mass production was almost impossible for the teeming consumers in the city of Port Harcourt and its environs.
Then again, we had the issue of flooding across the state. Several farmlands were flooded with the heavy rains that characterized the weather in the state. People complained and complained and complained, but didn’t know what the farmers were going through. A basin of garri flew to N7000! Then I started wondering what the Ministry of Agriculture had been doing all over the years. Subsistent farming is never the way to ensure food security and stable price of goods in the market. I began to wonder if the exchange rate was beginning to affect the price of garri too, after all rice went up because we closed our borders to foreign rice. But no, it was as a result of insecurity and climate change, for dollar should in no way be responsible for the price of locally produced commodities. I began to wonder why we can’t and haven’t gone into full scale mechanized farming. Tractors would have done justice to the creation of ridges and proper tillage for those farms that needed them. What about the cooperatives? Couldn’t they buy tractors and lease them one farmer after the other?
We have so much to do as a people and start blaming ourselves for a lot of things that go wrong, things that could be easily avoidable by acquiring the right persons with the right specialty to solve specific problems. For instance, there’s a ‘mad’ agro-business expert I’ve met personally- Shedrach Madlion is his name. His ideas are tested and tried as he owns farmlands and is into exportation of agricultural products big time. Some government officials have employed him for projects and he’s making his cool cash. He has ideas concerning fruits and perishable goods where conditioning centres are set up for our fruits and perishables of which a huge percentage get spoilt and lost during transportation, usually from the North to other parts of the country.
So on this World Food Day, it is my prayer that those in authority begin to do the right thing and not just pay lip service to the people. Ministries of Agriculture must wake up from their slumber and adopt practical ways of ensuring that the methods of farming in these parts change. Government should also ensure that communities are safe for the continuous flow of the production process, and even encourage the processing and packaging aspects of agriculture, which are yet to be harnessed.
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