'Attaining food security in Nigeria requires collective and urgent collaborative action amongst all concerned...'
The well-garlanded official also spoke on the potentials the country possesses, which major agricultural outfits and smallholder farmers can leverage on in order to benefit maximally.Our collective ability to meet SDG 2 – Zero hunger by 2030 globally appears elusive unless we take urgent action. Over 821 million people were food insecure in 2019, primarily driven by conflict and social unrest.
There is limited coordination and cooperation between the key actors who should work together to drive a cohesive and integrated action plan to ensure food security at local, state, federal, and regional levels. This lack of coordination is especially relevant because food and nutrition cut across multi-sectoral actors in health, agriculture, water resources, science & technology, the environment, trade & investment, gender, education, and financing landscapes.
As a result, there is an urgent need to transform and strengthen our food ecosystems so that we are better prepared to keep people nourished going forward. We can start by taking these four critical steps. In addition, we need centralised databases that match the numerous interventions attempting to feed the masses, with the biggest pockets of need. This would significantly address the mass movement of the unemployed to higher-income communities where they believe they can find food and minimise the rising rates of unrest and crime.
There are many shovel-ready solutions that we can implement that would see the number of food-insecurity Nigerian reduce, particularly in the North. The first should be to establish a national food ecosystems task force comprising stakeholders in health, agriculture, science & technology, the environment, trade & investment, gender, education, and financing landscapes.
We also need to support small and medium enterprises in the agriculture and food landscape in redesigning their business models to ensure that they can continue their businesses. These enterprises hire a large percentage of the marginalised population in the country if they shut down, hundreds of thousands of workers will become unemployed – leading to an economic catastrophe.
PT: If “food is medicine,” as you’ve often said, how do we strike a balance between feeding and economic earning?For me, the question is rather “how do we ensure that quality food that is nutrients-dense is affordable and accessible”? We have amazing local foods that are highly nutritious but not available all year round, highly perishable and not convenient for easy preparation.
A range of initiatives and entrepreneurial ventures are working to address these critical challenges, which are critical for Africa to feed itself and the world. For example, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition has initiated the Post-harvest Loss Alliance for Nutrition to foster appropriate solutions to reducing high postharvest losses caused by lack of functional cold chain system and inappropriate packaging of perishable produce. We also have to invest in local processing.
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