BUSINESS DRIVEN BY NEED
FOCUS ON FOOD!
Why must we wait for others to do for us, the simple things that we can do for ourselves, especially something as crucial as feeding our own people?
Tues.Jan.21.2025 - Ubochi Eke
Photo: In 2012 the Tesla Model S obliterated expectations for electric cars and launched u0022Good Businessmanu0022 Elon Musk into the business hall of fame. Like it or Not.
It is incredibly and flabbergastingly ridiculous to me that as a nation and people we still cannot solve the simple problem of hunger.
Well before we were colonized, we were not a hungry people, now after so called civilization, in the midst of modern cities, in spite of Global travels, despite academic laurels and lavish awards from global institutions, we superintend over a hungry people.
Are we not fools, that in our glorifications of ourselves in mansions, in the spraying of cash at events and the distribution of bags of rice in the village, in our continued exportation of ourselves as goods to foreign lands in self imposition of servitude, claiming the salvation of our kin, in the election of "appointment dishing" kin, as against the best the nation has to offer, we now live among a people who can no more predict their next meal, than a Lion can set a time for a Buffalo diet.
Something is wrong with us.
The Average Nigerian is living a life that is worse than our Ancestors did and in the area of food I insist, that is SIMPLY UNACCEPTABLE!
This article is not a regular version of Business Driven by Need, it is a call to arms, loaded with the solutions we need to "kill and dry: the notion of a people who cannot be certain of a meal.
It ends here, 2025 will go down on record as the year Africa reversed hunger.
While some will always be richer and others poorer, in Africa, a full stomach will not be a status symbol, it will be the minimum available to our people. and may all of the lands, waters, nature, Gods and Sons of Africa, arise so that we can put a stop to this foreign evil, that was fraught on this land by those who claimed to civilize it and is now sustained by our complicit silence, in the midst of the moral violence that is hunger.
Hunger is the central pivot of our global subjugation and food forms the propellant of our liberation and in 2025, I for one, will focus on food.
This is not about business, this is about life itself and in the remainder of this article, you will see how simple it is for us to end this scourge and maybe, it is precisely because it is so simple that we do not see it. Someone has convinced us that hunger is human norm, a natural condition of humanity that cannot be eradicated. Well even if it is Normal for "Humans", our history shows that it is not African history.
Now let's send it to the past.
WE ARE TALKING ABOUT LIFE
The 1st step to the solution of Africa's and Nigeria's mounting hunger and malnutrition problem is the recognition that when we talk about food, we are talking about life itself.
Naked and living in a tree a man will survive and his systems adapt, no bit of telecommunications technology is essential to life, power is not mandatory when there is Sunlight, you do not need a car when your legs are good, in essense, none of the things which we work so hard to provide for ourselves and our people, is as essential as the very thing that we have abandoned in order to chase the others.
1st comes food, then everything else. It is indeed impossible to please God, without food. Of all of the things that a life needs, most are merely wants that we have elevated overtime, food is primary to life, such that it is truly a need and is infact indeed life itself.
Let us 1st start by recognizing that we are talking about life. This article is indeed better titled "FOCUS ON LIFE!", but let us manage the title of "Focus on Food". However, when you understand food as life, you can better attend to it with the seriousness it deserves.
To fail to develop solutions to Food security in Africa, is a failure of Government, of Business Leaders, Of Social Leaders, of Fathers, of Brothers, of Sons, to take on their responsibility, their most sacred obligation of protection for themselves and our communities. It is sacrilege and stupidity, sharing a bed with Ignorance in an orgy that can only birth something that looks like this incredibly and flabbergastingly ridiculous society that we live in.
How can we be such bad children, Parents and Kin to give any excuses on the depreciation and expiration of the lives of our people to the rising costs of a basic meal.
Step 1, let us take this matter serious, it isn't business, it is life and death. And in choosing the lives of our people, we can still make it, a profitable business - A true BUSINESS DRIVEN BY NEED.
MAKE IT LOCAL
when we start this fight, we must next make food local again.
In Nigeria today as in much of Africa, food is produced in one remote corner of the country and then shipped across, on terrible roads and pirate seas to the other corners of the country. In the worst iterations of this stupiditiy, food is in fact imported from South Africa to Nigeria and Russia to Nigeria and the U.S.A to Nigeria. What?
It is a most inefficient modality that our food after feeding on Nitrogen and Sunlight, now require a gulp of fuel too, in order to get to our dinner tables.
This wasteful addition of time on the road, transport manpower, road side bribery and the general expenses of trucks, ships, trains and their fuels, makes food often 3 to 10 times more expensive than it needs to be.
Food must be local. It is not fashion that needs a Milan Fashion Week, it is not cars that needs a Munich Auto Show, it is not a House that needs Spanish Tiles, it is a source of energy and should be focused on giving energy and not consuming it.
more directly, this means making sure that the food we eat is farmed in the communities that need them.
There is absolutely no reason why there should not be a major farming settlement within 25 kilometers of every single citizen of Nigeria, whether they live in a city of a rural area.
Moreso, in a complete upside down math, food in the rural areas of Africa now cost more than in the cities, this because we are not importing so much food, from across and outside our countries, that food is now cheaper in proximity to Ports and Truck stations than in proximity to the villages which hold much of our vast farming reserves. This must stop.
We must being to actively invest in the development of Agriculture in the rural areas. This investment should see the security challenges, Agressive land logic, Native oppresion, Rural youth exodus and others as the problem to be solved in order to build profitable agricultural enterprises, that are the best form of charity for our people, because in working to earn a living, you can naturally save lives.
The simple availability of farms and agricultural industries in the rural areas will aid the reduction of unemployment, limit food inflation and make our people healthy again.
We must do this and we must do this now. Food should not cost "fuel", in doing this however, we must pick the crops with the same attention to human need, as we do our locations.
MAKE IT NATIVE
I find it very odd that we have systematically adopted foreign foods as a cultural menu. There is deep disgrace in the fact that the premier Grains, Fruits, Oils, Flowers, Tubers, Spices and Animals on the African diet are remnants of colonial trade.
It may shock you to know that Rice (Asia), Banana (Indomalaya), Canola Oil (India), Rose (Asia), Cassava (South America), Tomatoes (South America) and Broiler Chickens (Indomalaya )are all foreign importations that are not perfectly suited to our climate, dietary needs and cultural preferences.
The alternatives of Fonio, African Pears, Ground Nuts, Palm Oil, Yellow Trumpet, Yam, Grains of Selim (Uda, Erinje, Kimba) and West African Dwarf goats form much better solutions to the African culinary history, dietary solutions and A natural accompaniment to our natural health conditions and a suiting eco-systematic contribution to our soil and natural conditions that enable greater proliferation of food and enable us to feed ourselves.
As I launch the Agricultural Communes, I am not surprised that close friends are suggesting Holstein cows for milk, Alfalfa grass for cattle feeding and the planting f special crops that have automatic oftakers from Europe. It is not surprise, this is our programming, we continue to serve colonial interests in our dependency on economic transactions that involve them, even in something as local as food.
I will not engage in any such trades or importations, not because I do not believe that Holsteins are viable or that Alfalfa is a good food for cattle, or that farming Almonds for export is a bad deal. I will not engage in them because for the same water resources as a needed to raise Almonds for export, I can feed our people with Tons of African Pears. For the cost of a single Holstein cow, I can buy 2 each of Sokoto Gudali, White Fulani, Red Bororo, Ndama and Muturu, allowing me both the same milk production and also the opportunity to begin to breed better native cows and perfect feed and lifestyle for prime milk production. For the same land as I will reserve to learn to manage Alfalfa, I can annoint it with self propergating Elephant grass, and without much science, the rest will be history.
In farming our native crops and raising our native animals we will save a great deal of heart ache, land, mineral resources and capital.
Planting Bitter leaf requires no advanced farming abilities, raising African Dwarf Goats requires no imported medications, planting yams does not need an export license to find ready buyers.
For some reason we have made the planting of our lands, an economic concern that needs foreign markets when in fact we have 200 million people whose stomach is a much better "container".
MAKE IT HEALTH
It is very terrible when you speak to a Nigerian farmer and he says that he likes to raise pigs because they eat anything, even fecal waste. Huh? Pigs don't eat anything, they eat anything you give them.
Left with tasty mangoes and fresh greens, no pig will seek to fill its belly with worm infested feces.
Left with a healthy wild pig that has raised itself on beautiful forest culinary excellence and excercised its muscles will runing from predators, while will I eat this Pink sh*t that we now serve in our cities.
From our broilers to our vegetables, we are consuming cancer agitators and immunity inhibitors in the name of food. Why would I want to feed my own people with poision?
Not only must we farm and feed our people, but we must also feed them well. We mist make the effort to provide them with a diet that is befitting as the give of A Son, Brother, Father to their own kit and kin.
We will farm commercial and organic animals, allowing a steady migration to the full adoption of commercial scale, organic farming, short cuts are cutting the lives of our people short.
We will farm foreign and domestic crops in fertilizer and manured fields, allowing a mandatory return to the best of native varieties and the cropping of our lands on organic matter only without the twin poisons of chemical manures and pesticides.
Yes, I am aware that these notions are idealistic but we are taking about food, the food we will feed our own people and nothing but the best will do.
MAKE IT WEALTH
Agriculture is unsustainable if it is either a charity or a waste of time and economic resources.
We are not envisioning a charity but Business Driven by Need. In that guise we are committed to profitable agriculture and this is very, very possible.
The immense need of our people for food, coupled with the ridiculous lack of supply meets every economic indices for a viable market opportunity.
This however does not mean that we are oblivious to the many challenges that include Insecurity, Manpower shortage, Access to land etc. These challenges form the reason for my founding of the Agricultural Communes.
Yet and still, absent of participation in our Agricultural Communes, much opportunity still exists for individual farmers and groups to engage in profitable agriculture. For the most part however I recommend group farming, unless you have the capacity to run a large farm, all by yourself.
In the days past, agriculture was a group sport as entire communities, villages and clans went to farms on set days and enmass, such group participation gave no room for the insecurity we now complain of today, as such crowd is essential for farm and rural security and we must learn to farm in groups once again.
Be it families, churches, social groups etc., we must engage in group farming and at large scale once again, in order to eliminate much of the challenges, to include security, economics of scale and the benefits of synergized interests.
Done right, agriculture is a wealth multiplier that will allow us to expand our empires while giving our own people, hope for a simple meal, that does not cost them an arm and both legs.
MAKE IT GOOD
The world has become truely immoral and this is not our foundations.
From the beginning, we are recorded as having respect for life and nature and we must do that again, as we return to the farm.
Today, the same Western world that poluted the world, is trying to teach us to be eco friendly, what were we before?
From time immemorial the Africa has been a reliable custodian of the land, maintaining thorough compliance with cultural rules on the use of waters, lands and the interactions with animals in a masterclass of human ecological responsibility, well before we met the meaning of the word masterclass and global warming.
We must be genuine custodians of our lands and water resources, maintaining deep respects for water resources, wildlife, local communities and cultures, in a masterclass of human social development that is respectful, kind, human - good.
This has no adverse impact on the economic profitability of individual farms because strong research has shown that much of the wastes we now secreate in selfish destruction of down stream eco-systems can be recycled into farming systems as biogas, bio mass, manure and other good integrations to farming operations that are a synergetic gain to our developments and a human contribution to the society.
Furthermore, we can integrate animal preservation and respect for wildlife as tourist presentations for our farms integrated to attract visitors and the passionate affinity of our people. Of course these require scale, which is why i continue to advocate for large scale and community farming, whether dne by corporations, communities, villages or corporatives.
MAKE IT LOVE
why are we not inlove with ourself?
MAKE IT LOVE.
MAKE IT HEALTH
MAKE IT WEALTH
MAKE IT GOOD
Humanity, Repect for nature, Respect for the animals, water, nature
MAKE IT LOVE.
I don't blame you, if you didn't know there were so many options. I use the one they don't know about called the u0022spoonu0022, it works for every dish 🙂
WHAT AM I DOING?
there is no obligation to join our initiatives but if you have read this farm, it is a sign that you are truely interested in solutions. 1st I insist that you do something, anything, whatever you can to add to the food security of our people, following the above guidelines as much as possible. 2nd, if we wish to come allow here are my own visions for communal agriculture in Nigeria.
Click the link below to see our developments and find your role.
no matter what, do something!
Enough is Enough!
BDN - ARTICLES PROFILE
i Practive Oranomics and not Ecconomics. Oranomics is my restoration of African financial and Trade ideologies adapted into a course of study that I wish to introduce into our schooling system.
While Economics is "The Study of Lack", also called suppy and demand, Oranomics is "The Study of Abundance".
It is my firm belief that there is enough resources to go round the world 3 times and that we have no need to engage in combative business practices.
A focus on need, is all you need to find the businesses of the future and seal your position in the annals of time... Profitably.
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