As the global community marks World Food Day today, October 16, millions of Nigerians will do so either on empty stomachs or on poor diets.
In Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, for instance, food is a luxury, contrary to comments credited to Sabo Nanono, Nigeria’s minister of agriculture, that “there is no hunger in the country”.
However, for others like Abdulkadir Jidda, chairman, All Farmers Association of Nigeria, Borno State chapter, hunger is a part of daily life felt by people, not only in the state, but several places in the region.
“I feel very bad because we cannot even afford to participate in the ceremony of World Food Day. And you know the reason,” said Jidda, in a phone interview, referring to insecurity which has crippled agricultural output in once prosperous regions where going into farmlands 2 kilometres beyond the capital is now almost like a suicide mission.
“Under such situation, we cannot do anything (agriculture), or celebrate with anybody who is free,” said Jidda. “We are not free (to even produce food), so we cannot celebrate World Food Day.”
A total of 5.3 million Nigerians experienced acute food crisis in 16 states of northern Nigeria last year, when the country was identified among eight countries with the worst food crises in 2018. This was contained in the Global Report on Food Crises, which further noted that 22.7 million Nigerians in the north alone are at risk of food crisis if things do not improve.
When declining purchasing power by average consumers across the country is factored in, the picture gets grimmer as not only the north is at risk of acute food crisis, but even the south as well. If current trajectories do not change, things could even get worse, as Nigeria is expected to be the third most populous country in the world by 2050 with a population of 411 million, overtaking the United States and coming after both China and India.
Coordinated by the Food Security Information Network (FSIN), the food crisis report is described as a major collaborative effort between numerous agencies in the international humanitarian and development community, showing Nigeria’s food crisis puts it in the company of countries such as Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, the Syrian Arab Republic, the Sudan, and South Sudan.
This year’s theme for the World Food Day is not addressing hunger from the perspective of “food availability”, but from that of nutritious healthy diets. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), “This year, World Food Day calls for action across sectors to make healthy and sustainable diets affordable and accessible to everyone. At the same time, it calls on everyone to start thinking about what we eat.”
However, this requirement is largely another luxury in Nigeria, where many people are more concerned about getting something to eat, and less about how nutritious it is. Currently, 43.6 percent of children in Nigeria have stunted growth, according to the 2018 Global Nutrition Report. The prevalence of stunting is still classified as a high public health concern, according to World Health Organisation (WHO) standards. Wasting, a reflection of acute malnutrition, affects approximately 18 percent of children under five years old in Nigeria, which, according to WHO standards, is a very high public health concern, noted Feed the Future in its 2018 action plan for Nigeria.
In terms of under-five children with stunted growth, Nigeria ranks second in the world with 13.9 million children, and retains the same position among countries with under-five wasting, having 3.4 million children, according to the Global Nutrition Report.
In addition, Feed the Future’s report noted 71 percent of children and 48 percent of women of reproductive age are anaemic. Nutritionally, women are also affected by the burdens of being underweight (11 percent) and obese (25 percent).
In 2018, Action Against Hunger reported that its food security programmes have reached approximately one million people in Nigeria, “increasing their social protection, providing food assistance through cash and vouchers, promoting income-generating activities, and cultivating vegetable gardens”. The NGO is one of dozens that continue to spend millions of dollars to feed hungry Nigerians, who are unable to afford even basic meals, let alone good nutrition.
While government has for years embarked on subsidies in different forms for the agriculture sector, the current realities do not appear to justify all the rhetoric. However, for some industry experts like John Ogunlela, an agriculture consultant, “in discussing food and food security, it is important to balance cost of food with cost of living – with the farmer as the focus”.
“We often limit our discussion on food security to calls for cheaper food, forgetting that the farmer has a baseline determined by the cost of living. When you take this together, you will find that the cost of food in Nigeria is actually low – subsidised by the farmer, more or less,” Ogunlela said. “What this means in a progressive discussion is that farmers need to be subsidised if the dream of reduced cost of food is to be realised.”
Until such a time, however, millions of Nigerians are likely to remain hungry, and even more will be undernourished and subjected to various nutritional deficits.
CALEB OJEWALE
