Nigeria State Of Emergency Declaration On Food Security: A Policy Brief

In recent times, insecurity, climate change and its effects (including seasonal flooding, competing resource use and open conflict) and high inflation have brought Nigeria to the brink of a food crisis. Between January and April 2023, it was estimated by a consortium of UN agencies and other partners (October Cadre Harmonise, including WFP and UNICEF) that as many as 25m people could face food insecurity between June and August of 2023.
This comes at a time when the Global Economic Outlook report H1 2023, KPMG, estimated the unemployment rate in Nigeria at the end of 2022 at 37.7% while estimating that this would rise to 40.6% in 2023 and 43% in 20241. The World Poverty Clock indicates that 71 million Nigerians live in extreme poverty, the largest number globally.
The real impact of these hikes on inflation and food inflation will not be statistically revealed until the respective rates for July are released since these would be based on data for June. We, however, know from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), as well as from market surveys and observations, that a significant contributing factor to the price of goods and services in general, and food prices in particular, is the cost of transportation of food across the food value
chain - the cost of transportation of inputs and farm labour to the farm; the cost of transportation of farm produce to storage facilities, and or markets; the cost of transportation of processed food to markets, etc. among others.