Farm and Infrastructure Foundation (FIF) is an organization for policy influencing and promoting policy best practices in food security, agriculture and rural development, through public-spirited policy advocacy, knowledge-driven policy brokerage and evidence-based policy action research. ​

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​We envision that, though technology matters for the attainment of food security, policy matters even the more. Hence the need for a policy theory of food security to explain the situation with Nigeria, whereby despite the introduction and application of technology since independence in 1960, hunger persists across all ages of the people, in all strata of society and all the regions of the country, much beyond the internationally tolerable level. Therefore, our analytical attention as well as practical actions is sharply focused on the impediments in the governance environment militating against policy effectiveness, such as, among others: lack of voice and accountability, political instability and violence, government ineffectiveness, aberrant regulatory system, absence of rule of law, and uncontrolled corruption. 

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In dealing with this situation, FIF comprises professionals in different fields applying their knowledge to remove these policy impediments, with a view to improving life of people living in protracted hunger and malnutrition owing to no fault of their own, save the human factor of bad or badly implemented decisions of policy authorities in public and private sectors of the economy. Thus, FIF was founded on the ideals of policy responsibility, policy accountability and policy due process, following an intellectual stocktaking exercise in 1995 at Heady Hall (Economics Department of Iowa State University, Ames Iowa U.S.A.). By which time the role of policy in the fight against hunger had crystalized clearly enough, whereby the solution lies in the systematic reform of the policy process to complement the application of technology in agriculture and rural sector. 

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Our vision​

We envision a hunger-free nation wherein the citizens enjoy their fundamental right to food and agriculture plays its other endowed roles in the economy satisfactorily including income generation, livelihood improvements, among other roles.

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Our Mission

To give farmers and other rural poor a voice and a vote in the policy process for food security, income generation and livelihood improvements.

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Philosophical Context

The outcome of our critical thinking on the subject matter points in the direction of freedom from hunger as a fundamental right of humans to live an independent life in dignity and happiness, which resonates with the contemporary notion of food as a human right far more than the traditional notion of food as a mere human need. This underscores the doctrine of “Development as freedom” and grants the legitimacy of a derivative doctrine of “agricultural development as freedom from hunger”, thereby, going by intuitive reasoning, providing the ideological (policy) economist with the latitude to reject the unrestrained application of orthodox economic or development theory anchored on barebones market theory to agri-food systems. Hence the present proposition of the solution to the hunger problem in terms of FIF’s theory of change about the philosophical notion of food, i.e. from the traditional notion of food as a mere human need to the contemporary notion of food as a fundamental human right. 

 

“Freedom" describes the entitlement of man to freewill in choice making from a number of alternative courses of action, thereby making the idea of freedom a most precious possession of humanity. That is, “man is entitled to claim for himself freedom of will as of right. So, it seems, freedom is not a mere illusion begotten of man's inability to recognize the threads of necessity on which his will depend. Whereas the choice of one particular course of action usually, but not always, forecloses the choice of another in a mutually exclusive manner, so also a set of opportunity costs exists for any one course of action, or a combination of courses of man's actions, made in exercise of his right of freewill. From this philosophical viewpoint the questions arise: Is man in his thoughts and actions spiritually free from hunger? Or is he just "compelled by the iron necessity" of purely natural law of stimuli to eat food at intervals in response to hunger? The enquiry into the answers to these questions brings to the fore the connectivity between the nature of man's body (immediate man), his spirit (intermediate man) and his soul (ultimate man) about hunger, that warrants him to desire food always; and what is the role of food security in this connectivity?

 

The expression, “freedom from hunger”, combines two activities of the human spirit which the philosophical concept of development is all about: one of thought and the other of feel. Accordingly, "There can, therefore, be no question of putting thinking and feeling on a level as objects of observation". For, in the sequence of time, freedom as a product of thinking comes after observation", while feeling, including the feeling of hunger in humans, comes spontaneously without thinking before the observed experience. Thus, if agricultural development is viewed in this context, as a process in these spiritual activities, then it also is a spiritual activity comprising both aspects of thinking and feeling in the corresponding terms of freedom and hunger.

 

Our Board of Trustees 

 

• Prof I. Onyido – Chairman

• Prof G B Ayoola – Founder/President

• Prof J. B. Ayoola – Co-Founder/Executive Director

• Mr G. B. Adelabu – Member

• Dr S. B. Daudu - Member

• Mrs M. O. Adetunji - Member