Every season brings the same lament from the people who plan our food policy: that each young person who leaves the village, each agronomist who boards a flight to Manchester, each able-bodied hand who takes the road to Lagos or Aba is a withdrawal from a food system that can no longer afford the loss. It is a tidy story, and it is mostly wrong.
Labour leaving the land is not new. Migratory labour within Nigeria has always moved with the seasons, the harvests and the price of grain. What has changed is the vocabulary. We now call it brain drain, attach a hashtag to it, and treat a very old pattern as a fresh emergency. Roughly 1.8 million young Nigerians enter the urban labour market every year, and about 40 per cent of internal migrants leave rural areas to do it. They are not abandoning agriculture out of disloyalty.
This post was originally published on this site.
