Kolade: Food Prices: Fight Glut, Ban Importation I READ Luke Onyekakeyah’s article on the above topic, in which he lamented that despite the fact that we are in harvest time, food prices keep going up in Nigeria. The writer went to great lengths to blame the ban on food importation, especially the ban on importation of poultry and fish, for this scenario. He submitted that the ban on food importation is not in the overall interest of the Nigerian populace, since there is a dearth of local alternatives. While I sympathise with his raison de’tre, his submissions (especially as they pertain to food importation) need to be questioned in public interest. The last thing that our nation requires at this time is more importation, and a call for the opening of our borders to all manner of meat and fish from abroad, springing from a distinguished platform like The Guardian, should not be waved off as idle talk. It is for this reason that this writer would like to offer a few clarifications to Mr. Onyekakeyah and members of the public who might have been swayed wrongly by his arguments. Nigeria is a large country. And “Nigerians buy stuff!” We are the marketer’s dream come true. Therefore, everybody who has something to export anywhere in the world wishes to sell in Nigeria. However, Nigerians must realise that for every import of anything, which we could produce locally, we are actually aggravating unemployment at home and consuming against our national interest. Imports are excusable where there is no capacity for local production. While Nigeria may lack potential and/or capacity in technology products, the same cannot be said for agriculture. Nigeria has ample potential and capacity (in manpower and nature’s resource) to produce her own food. Meanwhile, local production of food is fast becoming an issue of national security. For example, a few years ago, India decided to reduce her soyabean exports. The government of India, rather than encourage producers of soyabean to export massively as it had always done, bought and stockpiled the produce in Indian national interest. That singular decision threw the food chain of a number of nations into immediate crisis, and actual public upheaval ensued in one or two. Lovers of history would recall that many a war had been won by cutting off supplies of food to dependent empires; modern equivalents of this are not far- fetched. Furthermore, we have heard again and again of the inferior quality of much of the rice imported into Nigeria, with attendant consequences. Mr. Onyekakeyah himself wrote of the questionable quality of chicken imports smuggled into our country. These, in themselves, are arguments against food importation. The writer argues, however, that Nigeria cannot produce enough chicken and fish locally to feed the nation. If he wrote that ten years ago, Mr Onyekakeyah would have been correct, but not in 2013. The dramatic trajectory, in quantity and quality, of local poultry and catfish production over the last four years should inspire confidence in our ability as a nation to feed ourselves. Even notable international fast food brands now patronize indigenous producers of chicken. What is happening, however, is that the stakeholders in the smuggling/ importation business have held the retail or open market business by the jugular, and would not readily allow local producers an in-road, especially in the urban and highly populated centres of the nation. Unknown to most Nigerians, there is a silent war going on between local producers and smugglers of animal protein (especially chicken). And the smugglers appear to be winning; just like pirates, vandals and charlatans are winning in many other spheres of our national life. While it is true that we have a long way to go, the stimulus funds injected into the agric sector, and the pressure put on banks to lend to farmers have yielded quite some fruit. A great deal of expansion has happened in the local poultry and aquaculture sector over the past six years, with many new entrants opening sizeable commercial farms with sophisticated machinery. Knowing that they cannot legally export chicken to Nigeria, big and credible names in global poultry trade like Tyson Foods are seeking ways of setting up poultry production facilities in Nigeria. This way, we shall not only eat more chicken, our citizens shall get more jobs. Contrary to widely held belief, locally produced chicken is not only available, it is also affordable and competitive. I just checked in the major cities of South West Nigeria; locally produced chicken in the open or retail outlets goes for between 550 and 650 Naira per kilogramme. Just last Saturday during her shopping, my curious wife haggled at an imported chicken seller’s shop near the gate of the University of Ibadan. One kilogramme cost 700 Naira. The seller made an apology, though, saying that the price was 600 Naira before Ramadan. I checked at a local market around Agege in Lagos; the price was the same. If so, then why not sell locally produced chicken? The real issue, though unspoken, is that the middle men who trade in these imported or smuggled poultry products make better profit margins from them, and would therefore not stock chicken from the local industry. And we should be asking why? One immediate reason is that owing to the level of development of our agric sector, our grains are more expensive than what obtains in nations like India, Brazil and Argentina. Therefore, on account of higher feeding costs, the cost of production of 1 kilogramme of chicken in Nigeria is significantly higher than what obtains in those countries. In addition, those nations boast bigger poultry integrations, which have achieved better economies of scale than our own. Thus, the producers in those climes can afford to push products to the market at lower prices. Let us assume that our smugglers even sell wholesome products from these climes to the Nigerian market, isn’t it strange to note that they are not passing the benefit of lower prices to consumers? At the retail end, the price of smuggled poultry is actually benchmarked against the local equivalent, with mere marginal reductions whenever they are under pressure. I must not fail to add that in fact, those who smuggle frozen chicken into Nigeria hardly buy wholesome chicken from reputable integrations abroad. The details of what they procure are better not explained in print. It suffices to say that they go all the way to buy the cheapest chicken that can be found. As I write, there are rumours of the outbreak of Avian Influenza in Brazil. In two to four months, some of the birds that should have been buried in Brazil may show up on dining tables in Nigeria! If someone were to ask, why then do smugglers sell more chicken, I would ask the person, “Why do book pirates sell more books?” Or “why do pipeline vandals sell more petrol?” Having gained unfair advantage at the cost end, they can deploy this advantage on the sales end to undermine the law-abiding producer. And this is where government comes in. It takes government to protect the interest of those who obey the law by censoring those who disobey it. When those who cheat on the system roam free, they are emboldened to intimidate, or even threaten, the law abiding. And that is the story of every industry that is undermined by smugglers in Nigeria today. Their mafia in the market is very strong and vicious. Why should Nigeria raise the poultry and fish that we shall eat at home? Several of us who studied Veterinary Medicine, Animal Science and allied disciplines started having better private sector jobs soon after former President Obasanjo banned the importation of poultry. Things have further improved for many of us since the Central Bank smiled on the agric sector. We have jobs today, and take better care of our extended families and our retinue of jobless dependants today because there is increasing local production of chicken and fish. Ten years ago, you could hardly find one flourishing private poultry disease diagnosis laboratory in Nigeria. Today, there are many of them all over the nation, employing hundreds of graduates. They have diseases of poultry to diagnose and treat to earn a living because more farmers are rearing chicken locally. I could say the same about live bird transporters, input suppliers, processors and other players in the poultry value chain. Once Nigeria decides to eat imported chicken, all of us will go out of job. What is worse is that even then, Mr Onyekakeyah may not get to eat cheaper chicken, as he has not eaten cheaper rice in all our decades of rice importation (by the way, those who travel to Asia, especially India, know the actual price of a bag of rice. Somebody is milking Nigerians through rice importation!). When Nigeria opened up the telecom sector, prices were high initially. But as the market widened, patronage increased and competition deepened, prices began to come down, and we have not seen the last on GSM prices yet. High prices at the outset should not be a disincentive for local production and consumption. In any case, as I have shown, imported chicken is not cheaper in Nigeria. The problem is that the import/smuggling mafia is in firm control of the open market of poultry and fish. They actively resist local producers’ access to the market. I am sure Mr. Onyekayekah does not know that as at the day he wrote (August 20, 2013), Nigeria has one of the worst gluts of poultry products in the world – and that this glut has lasted almost two years. Meaning; Nigerian farmers have one of the highest ratios of unsold chicken and unsold eggs in the world. The President of the Poultry Association of Nigeria, Dr. Ayoola Oduntan has spent the better part of the last one year criss- crossing the nation lobbying policy makers to help remove impediments that make it difficult for poultry farmers to sell eggs and chicken that they have produced with interest-bearing bank loans! Each time my four-year-old son sees our unsold trays of eggs piled up in the store, he gets ignorantly excited and says to me: “Daddy, see plenty eggs!” I have formed the habit of answering him in a somber tone, “That is the handiwork of glut”. Then one day he asked me, “Who is Uncle Glut?” This is how I answered him: “Uncle Glut is that man who asks us to tell the chickens to lay plenty eggs, but when the chickens have laid plenty eggs, he now tells all the people in Ibadan not to eat our eggs.” When I told him that, my toddler became pensive for a while, and then he said, “Anytime I see that stupid Uncle Glut, I will stone him!” Mr. Onyekakeyah and other well- meaning Nigerians should help us to stone “stupid Uncle Glut” to death, so that very soon, Nigeria may become a proud exporter of chicken, eggs and fish. Dr. Kolade, a Veterinarian, Farmer, and Creative Writer, lives in Ibadan.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Aug 2013 07:56:44 +0000
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