Formerly: Are Nigerians Hungry?

Hello,

Is it true that Nigerians are hungry? Whenever people suggest this, I always say "no", because when you go to the market there is lots of food if you have money and a lot of what they have always goes to waste. Yet people have told me that I am living in an imaginary world, that Nigerians are finding it difficult to eat.

What's your opinion? Do you think here are a lot of Nigerians who are hungry? Currently?

Thanks.

Update: Here is the question I really want to ask. Is Food Scarce in Nigeria? Some people say agriculture is an important business because Nigerians need more food, but my contention is that food is abundant and affordable in Nigeria as long as you earn a reasonable income. And so the problem is not really that Nigerians are hungry but that some people - unemployed people - don't earn enough for 3 square meals.

When I was in Abeokuta, I could eat a good meal at a buka for 40 naira and I read a newspaper report about a crippled man who earns 200-300 naira a day as a mobile cal center operator. If a disabled man can earn enough for more than 3 square meals at a buka, from a job that requires no education, why not the rest of us?

Let me Rephrase the Question.

Seun, are you Hungry?

I keep woundring if hunger is the reason why our police stand on the road to collect 20, 20Naira, Or maybe they are just doing it for fun,

YEs!!!! No!!!! nigerians aint are hungry!!! and U know why?? thats Cuz U've got a president who looks like a Chimpanzee

thelma2: Seun, are you Hungry?

No, I am not! The only time I am hungry is when I am broke, but that doesn't mean food is scarce in Nigeria!

I think a better way to ask my question would have been "is food scarce in Nigeria?"

I keep woundering if hunger is the reason why our police stand on the road to collect 20, 20 Naira

A policeman only needs to collect 120 naira a day to feed himself. If he has 2 children and his wife is working, he needs to make 240 naira per day (7200 salary) to feed them, and that is assuming that they don't get paid at all. But they collect much more than that, and they also get their salaries, so what's the problem?

Besides, if the police man is truly hungry, he will not go ahead and marry a wife and start making babies.

I feel that there is enough food in the country to feed all Nigerians, it is just that some Nigerians are not earning enough because they are unemployed, or lazy, or disabled. Even professional beggars in Lagos have enough to eat and raise their families; do you know that? The problem seems to be poverty and not scarcity of food.

Seun,

The thing is, there are many other things to pay for other than food (like transport, accommodation, etc.). These other expenses are 'harder' than food expenses (i.e. it is more difficult to compromise or substitute them), so people will tend to go without a meal so they can have more money to meet these expenses.

I think your original question ('Are Nigerians Hungry') is the right one to ask. What is the point of having abundant food if you can't buy it because it's too expensive or you don't have the disposable income to buy it?

I don't believe food is scarce in Nigeria.

What is scarce is the means to provide that food. Most Nigerians cannot afford the normal 3 square meal; simply because this has turned out to be a country where one bread winner (or two if the woman works) is (are) fending for an average nuclear family of 5, plus extended family (in-laws, nephews, nieces, cousins, family friends), and anonymous friends who surface from nowhere asking for 'help'.

Thank @Ka: I agree  the title is misleading. Food is not scarce, but people cant afford what is available due to unavoidably high cost of living.

And we all know the key contributor to starvation is not only peoples income, but unavoidable spending due to inefficiencies in social services,
, Nepa doesnt work: spend a lot on petrol, on small thinks like tatapupu for grinding pepper which is more expensive if there is no nepa.
, transportation cost in Nigeria is waaay too high.
, housing, yawk, where is housing for all by year 2000? Daily Dilema with Landlord
, education ,health, etc.

Where there is a failure of social services, it eats deep into peoples disposable income, driving people to disastrous choices of what to eat and when.

Bibi:

Thank @Ka: I agree the title is misleading. Food is not scarce, but people can't afford what is available due to unavoidably high cost of living.

And we all know the key contributor to starvation is not only peoples income, but unavoidable spending due to inefficiencies in social services,
, Nepa doesnt work: spend a lot on petrol, on small thinks like tatapupu for grinding pepper which is more expensive if there is no nepa.
, transportation cost in Nigeria is waaay too high.
, housing, yawk, where is housing for all by year 2000? Daily Dilema with Landlord
, education ,health, etc.

Where there is a failure of social services, it eats deep into peoples disposable income, driving people to disastrous choices of what to eat and when.

My dear u are really correct.food dey na money

NO, food is not scarce in Nigeria. But the cost of living is damn too high. Even if food is not scarce, and are readily available in the market, where they are not expensive, your income can hardly buy the quantity that will last your family. So people result to mbembe (buying is small quantity) because that is what your income can afford. Now, in Nigeria, it is typical of working class to always owe those selling foodstuff before the pay day! while those who are working are into habit of Book me down. i.e eat today and postpone payment till end of the month.

Bibi:

due to unavoidably high cost of living.

, transportation cost in Nigeria is waaay too high.
, housing, yawk, where is housing for all by year 2000? Daily Dilema with Landlord
, education ,health, etc.

Food is not scarce but i believe storage is our problem.

Now coming back to you Bibi:

1) where do you live in Europe?

##I dont believe transportation is that high in Nigeria even in London, transportation goes up every 2nd Januaryfor the past 7 years.##

## I dont believe any government can provide 100% housing services even in europe, there abound homeless##

Men, its just like the Crude Oil palaver, dont ya get it?

RAW food is never scarce: what is lacking is finished/processed food/goods. Thats just how Nigeria is.

We have lots of:

Raw Crude Oil, Raw Food, Raw minerals, Raw human resources, brains, men, everything, but little or no processing!

Its just amazing!!!

Thats why companies like Zartech sell by just processing food and producing efficiently (Farmers are *some* of the richest people in the world!). What we buy from them (processed) shud cost less than even what is sold in the dirty markets. Cant we use Economics of Numbers whosoever sells good, well-processed food (raised using efficeient state-of-the-art techniques/machinery) at cheap prices wud sell MASSIVELY. Abroad there is SOOO much competition among HIGH quality products YET,

Now, who's sayin cuz you earn 240 a day to feed a family of TWO <BIG Hiiisss!>

So, they will not shelter abi? NO clothes? NO skul? (hope n/body is naiive enough to believe in Free Education!) NO ,

In my opinion food isn't scarce in Nigeria. However, what I would argue for is that certain types of food are scarce. If you disagree, how do you explain that the same N10 that could get you 10 cups of garri in the 80s won't even get you 1 cup now?

This to me is as a result of, but not limited to:

- Failure of some of our farmers/traders to take up modern technology so that foods that would have lasted for a while before going bad end up been thrown away after a few days.

- less and less pple taking up farming, choosing instead to do white-collar jobs

- more and more land set aside for foods meant for the international market, to the detriment of staple foods

- land fragmentation caused by the same land being (re-)divided among larger families

- most of us opting for subsistence farming as opposed to large-scale farming

As always, my 2 cents

No food is not scarce.

we have lots of food in naija its just the jobs arent there for the people
to buy the food you need money and a job is where you get this money
its all like a chain reaction



the rich is just getting richer while the poor keeps getting poorer
all most of the people in naija cares about is themselves, its really sad

Akolawole:

Food is not scarce but i believe storage is our problem.

Now coming back to you Bibi:

1) where do you live in Europe?

##I don't believe transportation is that high in Nigeria even in London, transportation goes up every 2nd Januaryfor the past 7 years.##

## I don't believe any government can provide 100% housing services even in europe, there abound homeless##

Everytime i am drawn into a discussion about Naija, it is always 4 the wrong reasons
but heh here it goes again.

@ Kola here we go again, trying to compare the west with Naija anytime a negative truth is brought up.  

even here in the U.S there are homeless people, but the fact is that 95% of them are dope heads and even if u give them a hundred thousand dollars, they will use all of that to smoke crack and walk the streets rather than than take 1% to pay house rent. Anybody that wants to live in a house here will. All you have to do is work hard.
Do you have anybody living in the west? is he homeless? How come all the foriegners live in homes?
 Myself a case in study. Came to the U.S with little cash (and no college degree)  but i still could pay my house rent all the time. I dont see any reason y somebody would be homeless in the west unless u are a dope head.

And talking about food
 The average american kid  (10 yrs)eats about 100 pounds of chicken a year. The average 10 yr old Nigerian kid does not eat up to 10 pounds of chicken a year.

And my answer to the thread.
  Food 4 the average man in naija is very hard and thatz a fact.

@Sage

Bibi brought me to this.

The moment he mentioned "high cost of living", i was devastated because i dont believe that.

sage:

Food for the average man in naija is very hard and thatz a fact.

Facts?

Dont you eat before you leave Nigeria?

Ans: Of course you eat.

Can Seun please put this as a poll while we vote.

I have a poll asking people to vote on how often they eat.

I think the perfect title would have been "do we need more food in Nigeria?" It's amazing how finding the perfect title can take so much time and mental effort. I wonder if i should change it again.

@Akolawole

dont understand the reason for your devastation. You mean the cost of living is cheap for Nigerians living in Nigeria?

Regarding your two questions
##I don't believe transportation is that high in Nigeria even in London, transportation goes up every 2nd Januaryfor the past 7 years.## How can you compare Nigeria with london. What % of your income in london do you use for transportation? Compare that with Nigerians living in Nigeria. Transportation cost adjustment in Uk or other European countries is directly related to inflation and if you are working in a registered company, there is an annual inflationary adjustment to Income. This doesnt happen in Nigeria until there is riot, even so, there is not correlation between inflation and those increases. Secondly, transportation cost increases in Nigeria is due to artificial scarcities, low production capacities, greed, etc. These are the effect of failure in social system.

## I don't believe any government can provide 100% housing services even in europe, there abound homeless## I was not advocating for 100% housing, the fact is that inconsistent goverment policies do not measure up to their plans/promises. Goverments planned Housing for all by year 2000, water for all by year 2000 etc. The intent of such program was to create incentives to facilitate the program. But such programs failed. I was in nigeria, I contributed to the Federal mortgage bank scheme, what happened?. All the housing estates, not mortgage facilities, hence highjacked by moneybags. The issue here is not the housing, but programs that are not sustainable?

If you are devastated, you should be because if you are not in Nigeria, then you miss the agony on the ground.

And they say that 1 African country could grow enough food to feed the world.

If 4 African countries were dedicated to agriculture, food would become over abundant and the rest of the countries could concentrate of industry and other things.

Food is not scarce.
It is the means of getting this food that is 'scarce' or rather inadequate.

No, I am not! The only time I am hungry is when I am broke

but then many nigerians are broke + food is expensive

so if Nigerians say they're hungry, it's not because food is scarce but because they cant afford food. Because I remember when I used to live in Nigeria. My parents bought most of our food stuff when they go to their home towns because food's a lot cheaper there than the cities.

Personally, I eat two meals a day because I choose to. And this is not due to lack of funds/access to food. It is just that a lot of people, myself included, are always running late in the morning and getting a bite to eat is the last thing on our mind when we are rushing not to be late to work/school.

@ Afeni, tis tis. that's not healthy.

don't worry. i don't eat breakfast most of the time either. . . but then school's over so i have no excuse not to now.

Let me expatiate on this. Can we call unprocessed food, "food"? For example, the terribly unhealthy meat that we all buy in the markets. You know, with flies and all sorts of insects having a feast! Unhealthy Unhealthy Unhealthy!!! Rotten fruits, tomatoes, unfresh veggies!!!, everything!

Someone has to do something about the food in Nigeria. Just a little added-value (e.g a firm that makes the meat more fat-less, less dirty, etc.). Its amazing how people even live here! Little wonder the Life-expectancy in Nigeria is like 51 yrs (YES, you heard me, probably even less!).

And,

And they say that 1 African country could grow enough food to feed the world.

If 4 African countries were dedicated to agriculture, food would become over abundant and the rest of the countries could concentrate of industry and other things.

True talk there, Drusilla.

why would you want to eat the food they have here. . .it has all the chemicals mixed in it
the only processing they need to do to the food in naija is making sure they are more tidy

Yes. If a brand can be developed that represents clean, low cost Nigerian food, it will draw in a lot of money.

Well, i know i eat when i'm hungry and i'm a nigerian

so ARE NIGERIANS HUNGRY?

ANSWER: NO THEY ARE NOT

Thanks, my brother. All these "selfless" NGOs looking for money are misrepresenting us.

NO! Check d no of lorries with onions, tomatoes, potatoes,yams and other foodstuffs flying(?) all over d place.
Nigerians eat, u even see beggars with big plates of food.
My people say "everybody eat garri but the difference lies in the soup." The question is what do nigerians eat?

Guys,let be realistic,NAIJA is BLESSED,i mean beyond MEASURE,but the only problem we have is MISMANAGEMENT frm our leaders,can you notice that,even when there's SCACITY of anything, there's alway a way forward. food is not scarce in naija,but,there's is HUNGRY,why :'due to BAD LEADERSHIP .may GOD help us.

Nigeria has no real middle class and when there is no middle there is no full employment
middle class creates jobs.The rate of inflation is not in tune with level of pay
Anyway that's what I'm learning in school
I don't know if Nigeria has welfare system to help the poor like here in the States.
And I don't know, if the poor get food stamps in Nigeria.