The Federal Government has declared that the former Central Bank governor’s naira redesign policy rendered farmers in Nigeria bankrupt due to the hardship they encountered from December 15, 2022, to February 2023, when the Supreme Court ruled against it.
The Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, Senator Abubakar Kyari, stated this in his 2024 budget defence of the ministry when he appeared before the Joint Senate and Representatives Committee on Agriculture on Monday in Abuja.
The minister said the 2024 budget was designed to achieve food security and fill gaps created by the financial challenges that affected food production in the country.
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.”
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.
