Recently, a segment of the Nigerian elite is busy on the pros and cons of opening our food borders driven solely by the subject of why food prices keep increasing even though internal production seems to increase in time and space. A significant portion of this segment believed that this sad reality ought not to have been so since, it seemingly appeared to be one against the laws of demand and supply most analysts apply in defining path for creating food availability and optimal pricing for the benefits of both the government and the people.
You see, like most scientific laws, the law of demand and that of supply relative to pricing were derived under normal assumptions called ceteris paribus. Here, all other relevant factors and considerations like panic buying of foodstuff for fear of future price rises and selling stored foodstuff for reasons to do with future pricing curve uncertainties, hoarding foodstuff for maximizing profits and so many other ones were supposed not to exist along the continuity axes of the demand-supply paths and so, their cumulative functional effects were ignored by considering such paths constants.
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There are many reasons for this kind of considerations in science generally; chief among them is that buying and selling are to economics and commerce but movement of price paths is physics and laws of physics generally, are known by many but understood by few. Thus, the classical price-demand and price-supply laws tend to only work near perfectly in countries whose sequences are complete in the Banach sense. Other countries with imperfect and incomplete sequences in their domains like my beloved country Nigeria are left without theories to apply, to better pose their entire food pricing problem. This stands for the principal reason why direct application of the laws of demand and supply relative to food pricing is a bad idea and a poor posing of the problem completely in our case as a system. Consequently and sequel to the nature of our surface herein Nigeria (incomplete sequences), the need for stronger laws to understand the dynamics of why, what, when and how cannot be overemphasised.
From physics viewpoint, price of foodstuff in Nigeria is on the rise at the moment sequel to the excess energy the price particle gained since border closure. The stabilizer (itself a non-negative function) of the price vector is the opposing price of imported foodstuff into the country in accordance with Newton’s 3rd law of motion. That is why countries with high level economic sense do not close their borders from food importation since balancing the price driver is needed for controlling food prices. Essentially, it is not even how much you produce as a nation (locally) that determines the price; rather it is how much you produce in the light of how much importers bring onto the country from outside that does the magic. This way, closing our food borders is synonymous to increasing food prices since the stabilizer of the price vector is near zero when borders are closed.
The physics of how opening food borders onto our surface controls the price path is that; when food borders are opened, local farmers step up production and quality control since they have to compete for market. Again, opening food borders ensures flooding the market with higher food volume and magnitude in the presence of the volume produced here, thereby reducing the risks attached to hoarding from arbitrageurs and opposing politicians for control and sabotage.
Worthy of note is that, if the government closes food borders due to poor economics, one opposition politician can buy the entire food commodities produced in the country, hoard all of it and then control the price by increasing the energy of the price particle time to time in the upward direction. Consequently, you see increasing price in time and space leading to higher likelihood of making the government unpopular and even traditionally outdated; since food is a necessity and a hungry man is always an angry man.
Finally, there is less economic sense altogether in food border closure just to improve the volume of home food production. This is poor economics so to speak. Home production in countries with higher economic sense are enhanced through shift to mechanised farming where government takes the lead in providing requisite machineries and credit facilities to genuine farmers (not fraudulent ones) one way or another in the presence of competitive mechanisms like food importation that sustain and manage food prices to a level affordable by most people. The Buhari administration needs to understand this reality and act in a way that ensures food sufficiency and availability to the masses of our beloved country.
Dr. Sulaiman is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics, University of Eswatini, Kingdom of Eswatini (formerly, Swaziland).
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