Abstract

The state of our agriculture and food security in Nigeria today is a threat to the masses; in fact it is nothing to cheer about. The country has resorted to the level of importing millions of metric tons of essential food such as rice, wheat, floor, vegetable oil, beefy, chicken, fish, among others from foreign lands, in spite of her great potentials in agriculture. Nigerians were not eating from the dust bin during the era of our founding fathers, but today, Nigeria has got food scaverigers that daily monitor dust bin to get their daily food supply. Alas!! Our country is in trouble. There is no concrete policy of the government on agriculture that can make food production a reality. What the government is good at doing is mere slogans and lousy statements that are devoid of action. They assume that all is well in the agricultural sector because a lot of money is being injected into it whereas all is not well. Agricultural inputs that used to be available to farmers as at the inception of Nigeria till early 1980s were a thing of illusions to common farmers since the inception of democracy (1999) to date. The importation and distribution of fertilizers have been so much politicized and bastardized that the product is not imported at the right time and is not given directly to the end users who are the farmers. Instead, the allocations are given to politicians and their cronies who then re-sell them at exorbitant price which most times are unaffordable by the farmers. The various river basins development authority are not functional and do not produce food. They exist as a mirage where there are workers that receive salary every month, but the production of food is absent. However, the River Basin Farm Authority failed because, in Nigeria today, there are many chiefs and not enough Indians. Many Nigerians want to arrive without travel and this seems to be the reasons our economy is in shambles. In view of these, the paper used available literature to review the status of Nigerian agriculture in the 21st century: the problems and solution proposals.