Frequent conflicts between farmers and cattle herders in Nigeria's Benue valley have become a clear and present danger to food security. Fostered by the drying Lake Chad region and the Boko Haram, the horizon is becoming ominous.
"Agriculture is the mainstay of this economy. Few people indulge in livestock farming such as pigs, sheep, goats and the 'Muturu' cattle. Most families depend on the revenue earned from crop production for their livelihoods, but the crisis there is posing a lot of risk to agriculture," Fanen, a migrant farmer from Agasha Village in Guma Local Area of Benue told THISDAY.
Sandwiched within the company of a couple others who migrated from Guma - a lush farming community on the North-eastern part of Benue, to Nigeria's capital city, Abuja, on the back of frequent farmers clash with cattle herders on the Benue, Fanen, suggested that communal farming and indeed food production from Benue was perhaps troubled by the clash.
He said: "The rains were good this year, and that would have made farming easier, but few people tilled the grounds. Those who went out, always did that with a lot of fear for their lives."
Situated just within what is regarded as Nigeria's Middle Belt region, and along a good stretch of river systems, Benue State, is often described as the 'food basket of the nation', a sobriquet it perhaps earned from its good use of the natural agriculture endowment it got from nature.
The state holds one of the longest stretches of river systems in Nigeria, and is known to have great potential for a viable fishing industry, dry season farming through irrigation as well as for inland water highway. Benue has both in diversity and quantities, good food cultivation and production almost all year round.
The state is reputed as the largest producer of yam, cassava, mango and citrus in Nigeria, with yams identified in a 2011 General Household Survey Panel (GHS-Panel) conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and the World Bank, as an integral component of food consumption and agriculture sales in Nigeria.
But these agrarian potential and diversities are reportedly getting worked by the vagaries of climate change and migration - two critical conditions with a striking nexus that has remained quite inexplicable to community folks, and itinerant cattle herders whose passage through the state has lately come with conflicts.
