Food Sovereignty vs Food Security

‘Have you seen the price of poundo yam? I will like eba by force,’ a friend told me a few months ago.

Nigerians are currently going through a tumultuous economic period, with inflation reaching a 17-year high of 20.52 per cent in August 2022. Across various socioeconomic strata, Nigerians are adjusting their consumption, sacrificing some of their wants and prioritizing need in response to the new economic reality. In this gloomy period, where there seems to be no end to the increasing prices of goods and services in sight, the yam harvest season arrived like a beacon of hope, with prices of yam in Lagos decreasing from N2,500 to N800 per large-sized tuber in the past few weeks.

Yam, a crop indigenous to West Africa, is deeply rooted in the socio-cultural fabric of most Nigerian communities.

The beginning of the yam harvest season is marked by ‘new’ yam festival celebrations across different regions in the country. With annual yam production of about 50 million tonnes making 70 per cent of global yam production, and valued at $13.6 billion, yam is central to conversations around food security in Nigeria.

In Nigeria, production of yam—which is commonly prepared into several dishes such as boiled yam, fried yam, roasted yam, amala (made from yam flour) and pounded yam—is exclusively carried out by low-income smallholder farmers in rural areas across the country. Despite the large yam market in Nigeria and its socio-cultural significance, the yam value chain—from farm to market—is rife with challenges. These challenges, combined with the current economic conditions across the country, threaten to further impoverish yam farmers in rural areas and push yam prices further beyond the reach of the average Nigerian.