The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) and the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) have seen bio-fortification of crops as the major solution in addressing issues of malnutrition in Nigeria.
Both organisations urged the Federal Government to commit more funds to encourage the cultivation of more bio-fortified crops in the country to tackle malnutrition and also call for the establishment of a national nutrition board in Nigeria.
Speaking at a Quarterly Media Parley organised by the Food and Agriculture Writers’ Organisation of Nigeria (FAWON) in Lagos, Lawrence Haddad, executive director, GAIN, said Nigeria’s budget on nutrition from the overall government expenditure is the lowest at about 0.2 per cent.
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“We need to spend more money on nutrition and spend the existing money better. Nigeria needs to have more bio-fortified crops on the field,” said Haddad.
He exhorted all the tiers of government to pay more attention to nutrition while noting that the development of any nation is solely dependent on its active workforce, which comprising young people who need adequate nourishment from food to be productive.
According to him, Nigeria runs into a nutrition crisis every year and the situation resulting in a 10 per cent loss in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), saying that government at all levels need to be more proactive to tackle the menace by investing more money in nutrition.
Speaking on his report on nutrition, the executive director said “since 2015, when we started this report, we discovered that 40 per cent of all countries in the world have massive problems of undernutrition. This figure has now gone up to 60 per cent.”
“37 per cent of children under-five are stunted in Nigeria. Without proper nutrition, the future of a child is being thwarted. However, there is a need for more funds to be ploughed into programmes and schemes on nutrition because malnutrition is an expensive challenge to overcome.
“Nigeria needs to have a national nutrition board where the government will create competition among each state to reduce the prevalence of malnutrition in the country. We need a powerful alliance to overcome malnutrition and government need to set the pace for the private sector to drive it,” Haddad added.
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Also speaking at the event, Debisi Araba, regional director, CIAT, said there is a need for better and proper coordination of nutrition in the policy space to improve nutrition challenges in the country. “Nutrition needs to become a thing of national priority and there is a need to carry the private sector along. The government cannot do it alone,” Araba said.
He, therefore, advised the Federal Government to partner with the private sector in the production of more bio-fortified food to meet diet diversification demands, while calling on the government to make it easy for agribusinesses to do nutrition business.
“Post-harvest losses are still very high in Nigeria and businesses have been trying to address the issue through the use of solar panels to create cooling stations but the tariffs on solar panels are very high and the tariffs on insulation products are also very high. The government need to address this for businesses to do more in scaling up nutrition,” Haddad who was earlier quoted said.
Josephine Okojie
