The farming season is once again with us. Farms have since been cleared, some crops have been planted and the weeding process is going on. The expectation of farmers and indeed the country at large is for a bumper harvest, especially with present food shortage, which has led to skyrocketing of prices and pushing many families perilously close to hunger. Mercifully, the rains, which appeared a bit delayed this year have started falling, at least in a good chunk of the country. The fervent prayer is that they will be adequate enough for this farming season.

Adequate rains, however, are just one of the necessary conditions for a bumper harvest, something we earnestly desire to alleviate the current food shortage. Increased agricultural output requires substantial investment, for more than anything the country is investing in the sector today. For sometimes now, especially since cheap money started flowing from oil, agriculture has been relegated to the background. Perhaps, it is far easier to extract oil from the ground and smile all the way to the Central Bank from the proceeds of the sales than the back-breaking and tedious activity of cultivating the land. The snag though is that time will come, or may be is already here, when with all the billions in the banks we may not be able to find countries willing to sell us, at any price for that matter, the foodstuffs we need to feed our population. It says a lot about the importance of agriculture that rich non-agricultural countries have lately been trooping to successful agricultural nations, literally on their knees seeking to purchase foodstuffs, such as rice, wheat and maize for their needy citizens. Any nation, especially a developing one like our own that neglects agriculture does so at enormous risks to its food security and by implication its national security.

Agriculture used to be an attractive occupation, paying good dividends for the engaged in. It is no more so, largely due awful neglect by successive governments and climatic factors such as decreasing rains. The youths are leaving the drab rural areas in droves to choked cities where life is far less better than their expectation. In other words, there are fewer hands on the farms today than say three decades ago and those left have to cope with enormous problems, ranging from failing rainfalls, inadequate or unaffordable fertilizers, high interest rates on bank loans, and poor market prices for their commodities, among other crippling conditions mitigating against good harvests. Agriculture is almost becoming a side-show today, even though it is the mainstay of the economy. The small-scale peasant farmers who form the bulk of those engaged in farming have long lost hope in the willingness of the authorities to lend them the necessary support so as to boost output. Yet, our hope for increased production rests largely on this class of farmers. Indeed, without the small-scale peasant farmers, our agriculture would be doomed, leaving the country hungrier, poorer and perhaps politically unstable. We need the peasant framer in a manner a fish needs water. If he is supplied with the necessary farm inputs and implements, re-trained and guaranteed good prices for his produce, he can deliver our food requirements, banish hunger and save us a lot of foreign exchange.

This is why the government ought to worry very much about the whopping $5 billion the country spends on average yearly on food imports, some clearly just to meet the exotic tastes of the wealthy urban class. Imagine what this huge amount of money could do to local food production, if it was ploughed into farming,, particularly as assistance to the local peasant farmers, to provide better seedlings and to build small earth dams for irrigation. Farming and the peasant farmers deserve better attention than they are getting at the moment. Agriculture should be at the top of our development agenda, if only because at the moment there is really no substitute for a sector in which the majority of our people earn their livelihood from.

Oil money, which is partly responsible for pushing agriculture to the margins may have been a sort of blessing, although in our case it is debatable whether it is really such a blessing given the level of poverty in the midst of this oil boom. It is however, about time we looked less to the so-called black gold, which by the way is not an inexhaustible commodity and turned more to the surer and more dependable sector of agriculture. Oil money makes sense only if it is wisely used in infrastructural development. Agriculture makes even better sense in the sense that not only is it the largest employer of labour in the country, but most importantly it feeds the population, eliminates the grim nightmare of food dependency and thus ensuring the vital goal of food security for the country. This is why agriculture matters, perhaps more than any other sector of the economy at the moment and thus deserves the attention commensurate with this importance.