The first time I took notice of wheat farming in Nigeria was during the IBB years when he launched the National Accelerated Wheat Production. This was in response to the crisis of the importation of wheat with which bread was made. The prices of bread were rising and making the popular and convenient food to be out of the reach of the ordinary people. While there were experiments to move to using cassava to produce bread by far the most ambitious initiative to deal with the problem was to produce locally enough wheat both for local consumption and for export. The crisis of the importation of wheat was painstakingly documented and analyzed in the book by Profs Bjorn Beckman and Andrea Gunilla entitled The Wheat Trap. Trap it was since Nigerans got hooked to bread which is consumed by both the high and the low but whose production solely dependent on almost 100% importation of wheat. Even as of now, with so much interest in wheat farming, the country still imports about 90% of our wheat consumption.
The government decided to support the local production of wheat through the National Accelerated Wheat Production and targets were set for states that were found as potentials for contribution to the national record. Although Kano, Jigawa and Bauchi states were part of the states where wheat was to be produced, in those years, I cannot remember seeing any major wheat farm in any of the three states. A friend who is late now told me how civil servants creatively measured the wheat production and get the incentive of millions of Naira meant to boost production. He said they had a figure of average yield per hectare, and they simply multiplied that with the number of available hectares of land in the state for wheat farming and hurrah, they had millions of tons of wheat produced. Where it was, was left to everybody’s guess.
