The Arewa Economic Forum (AEF) has called for the establishment of “safe enclaves” for cattle rearing in the northern part of the country to address insecurity bedevilling the region.

The forum’s chairman, Shehu Dandakata, made the call while addressing journalists on Monday in Abuja.

Mr Dandakata said the prevailing security challenges started with cattle rustling for more than 15 years before it graduated and matured to banditry.

He said banditry had negatively affected cattle rearing and agricultural production, adding that crop farming and animal rearing had been devastated.

Mr Dandakata urged the federal government and Nigerians to check the issue of insecurity to address food scarcity.

“Just yesterday, the association of rice farmers said that Nigeria can only produce 57 per cent of what it requires of rice if all land is being put under cultivation,” he said.

“So you can see the kind of danger that Nigeria is in, and any country that does not have food security is at risk of breakup,” he added.

Mr Dandakata said the forum was “proposing what we call safe enclaves for cattle rearing; it is a known fact that the first victims of banditry are the Fulanis because this banditry started with cattle rustling up until today.”

Mr Dandakata said such safe enclaves would help the Fulani herders to assemble in one place in gazetted grazing reserves, where the government could give them all the necessary support.

He said they could leverage the private sector and NGOs to give them what they need in those gazetted reserves while the security agencies would give them the required security.

According to him, those locations are places that nobody can encroach upon since they were gazetted.

On the issue of food security, Mr Dandakata said the challenge of banditry had left thousands of hectares of land lying fallow in those commercial farms that had hitherto supported food production across Nigeria.

According to him, more than 100,000 hectares of land lie across northern Nigeria, with big silos that are not put under cultivation.

He urged the federal government to empower the Bank of Agriculture to look for a multilateral facility to make those farms cultivable and put them back into production so that there would be food security.

According to him, Nigeria is a vast country with a huge population, and the issue of hunger in the country is real, and small triggers can make it violent.

(NAN)