Climate Change: A Leading Threat To Food Security In Nigeria

Climate change occurs in a number of ways, stretching from increased climate variability and slow variations in temperature and precipitation to increased incidence and amount of extreme events. Variations in climatic conditions constitute main challenges for agriculture productivity, this is because climate change affects access to good quality water, habitats and species distribution, timing and length of growing season, distribution of agro-ecological zones and Ecosystem stresses. Over 70% of Nigerians are basically farmers, who mostly depend on rain-fed agriculture. With the change in climate, there is a change in rainfall patterns, mostly delayed onset of the rainy season, farming of food crops is usually delayed and this in most cases results in poor harvest, which threatens the food security of most farming families. This trend is also of concern to the larger Nigerian population who depend on the rural farmers to supply the bulk of the food consumed in urban areas. These bad experiences especially of droughts and floods have caused many local or rural farmers to abandon their villages and move to the cities in search of other means of livelihood thereby causing economic hardships as prices of common staples tend to soar higher and the food security of the nation is at risk. Other factors mitigating against food security and under nutrition in the country are insecurity and government lukewarm attitude towards ending hunger and under nutrition. The impact of climate change on food security including agricultural productivity, and food security dimensions are discussed. The Global Hunger Index scores for Nigeria for the past two decades (2009 -2019) has been used to show that for the past twenty years, Nigerians have been in a state of serious hunger, highly undernourished and in a serious state of food insecurity. Recommendations such as providing farmers with information on early warning signs or signals to prevent them from investing heavily in flood prone areas to prevent the huge losses suffered by farmers as a result of flood and embarking on large irrigation projects to support poor farmers with water in drought prone areas so as to cushion the effect of poor farm yield as a result of low rain fall were proposed.