KANO, Nigeria — Nigeria’s militant Boko Haram group hasn’t only killed thousands of people in its campaign to impose Islamic law; it’s wrecking agriculture in some of the country’s main food-growing areas.
With farmers afraid to go to their fields in Nigeria’s northeast, rains that exceeded expectations failed to translate into a better harvest.
“No one can move a kilometer due to fear,” Abba Gambo, an agricultural-science lecturer at the University of Maiduguri said recently. “Most of them have fled their homes.”
More than 1.5 million people, mostly farmers, have been forced to flee their homes as Boko Haram intensified its insurgency in the past year, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The worst-hit states of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa produce staple foods such as cowpeas, rice, millet, sorghum, corn and yams as well as tomatoes, onions, fish and livestock.
Boko Haram, which translates as “western education is a sin” from the local Hausa language, is entering the sixth year of a campaign to impose Islamic rule in Africa’s biggest oil producer and most populous country of more than 170 million people. At least 13,000 people have died in gun and bomb attacks carried out by the group across northern Nigeria and the capital, Abuja, according to the government.
