A New Politics of Agriculture in Kano-Nigeria: Groundnut ---

A New Politics of Agriculture in Kano-Nigeria: Groundnut for Chickens or Humans?

By

M. M. Yusif – WTO Mock Summit paper
08/01/09

Competition between chickens and human species for available groundnuts produced in Nigeria has become a struggle for survival. Daily Trust of Thursday 8 January, 2009 reported that “a cute scarcity of eggs has hit Kano due to scarcity of groundnuts which translates into growing rise of prices of poultry feed”.

Groundnuts (or peanuts) were produced in large quantities in Nigeria’s northern region. In 1961 Nigeria’s share of world groundnuts exports was 37.8 percent. In monetary terms from 1961 to 1964, the value of Nigerian groundnuts exports reached as much as 36.6 million pounds (plus another 6.5 million pounds of groundnut oil). Kano seemed the highest producer among the groundnuts producing states of northern Nigerian region as the distribution of northern region marketing board groundnuts purchases showed that in 1960-61 Kano provided 45% of all the purchases (Helleiner, 1966).

The groundnuts are shelled for all purposes including for export and other domestic usages. The shelled ones can be consumed without further processing. It is a rich foodstuff, of nutritious value in particular because of its high protein content. It is also an important source of oil both for export and domestic consumption. Furthermore, it is used for the manufacture of margarine, compound cooking fat ad directly as a cooking or salad oil.

In later years, roughly from 1966-1970 groundnut production began to decline and their export including the oil produced from them have declined and had made up only 17 to 26 percent of Nigeria’s exports. From 1970s to date there has been absolute decline of production and given the increasing modernization of Nigeria’s economy the exports of the peanuts products have stopped.

Some ideas of the less demand of peanuts needed in Europe and America could be seen by new brands of oil available there. Secondly, a new modern food have already evolved which need no oil to process. Thirdly, they have developed many alternative sources of oil from pigs, fish, poultry, livestock, etc by the type of meals used as their feeds.

The change of direction from peanuts as a source of oil could be seen in the mission of “Green Revolution”. This revolution was packaged to produce wheat and maize not as food to peasants of Nigeria but for the growing livestock and poultry projects in Europe and America. The emphasis on these had caused further decline and less importance of groundnuts production in Nigeria as in other West African region.

In order to meet the demands of EU and US Agricultural policies we have lost our groundnuts project. We don’t have to refer to any record of quantities produced because there is no any significant quantity to record. Indeed, we have also become importers of the nuts to meet some domestic food requirements.

What does worry us is that the millions of chicken now in Nigeria is being fed on food which every Nigerian from the poor to the rich is needed as food supplement. The groundnut cake in particular is the food of the poor. But a tone of groundnut cake was N16,000 but now it is N70,000. Yes! This means the poor must give up the groundnut cake as part of his diet. The same groundnut cake is used as poultry feed. Because of the price hike of the groundnuts cake the price of eggs has gone up beyond the ability of at least a middle class to afford. The said Daly Trust reported that before the scarcity a crate of egg was sold at N570 but when the scarcity appears in the state a crate is sold at N700. Also before the scarcity, a fresh egg was sold at N25, but now, after the price hike of the nuts it is sold at N30 to N35.

A final point, which shows light to further understanding of this problem is that the new politics of agriculture under the WTO multilateral trade regime is pushing Nigeria to a position of also declining poultry industry to become importer of chickens as it were of beef.