Achieving Sustainable Food Security in Nigeria: Challenges and Way Forward

One of the goals of Nigeria’s agricultural development policy is to ensure that the nation produces enough food and less dependent on importation so as to ensure adequate and affordable food for all. Using descriptive statistics, this study is an attempt to evaluate food security situation in Nigeria from 1991 to 2015. The paper shows that there is a shortfall in domestically produced food in Nigeria because the growth in the population of Nigeria is at the rate of 3.2% while the growth in food production has been less than one. This shows that demand for food (population) is greater than the supply (agricultural production) because of factors such as inconsistent government policies, environmental degradation and non-sustainable agricultural production. The paper also shows that Nigeria depends so much on food importation. To achieve sustainable food security in Nigeria, the paper recommends an improvement in environmental management in other to increase agricultural productivity

Impact of Fiscal Policy on InclusiveGrowth in Nigeria

Among the macroeconomic goals of the Nigerian government are the following objectives: to stimulate economic growth, reduce unemployment, poverty, and inequality. To achieve these objectives, the government continues to alter its expenditure pattern. Despite these policy changes, the rates of unemployment, poverty, and inequality continue to increase. The objective of this study is to investigate how fiscal policy can be designed to promote inclusive growth as well as identify the most effective fiscal policy instrument that can lead to inclusive growth in Nigeria, using annual data from 1980 to 2017. The Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) model was adopted for the analysis. The result shows that government capital expenditure is a more effective fiscal policy instrument forachieving inclusive growth in Nigeria. The dominance of the shocks to tax revenue has a higher impact on unemployment than on poverty and per capita GDP growth rate. Based on these findings, it is recommended that the Nigerian government should strengthen the mobilisation of tax revenue and channel it towards government capital expenditure in order to promote inclusive growth in Nigeria. Keywords: Economic growth, fiscal policy, inclusive growth, government expenditur