Nigeria, Sudan, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, the Syrian Arab Republic, are expected to remain among the countries with most severe food crisis in 2019 as a large segments of populations in most of these countries risk falling into acute food insecurity.
According to the “Global Report on Food Crises 2019” (GRFC 2019) of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), World Food Program (WFP) and EU, hunger has spread to well over 100 million people over the past three years, with the number of countries affected, rising.
A further study of the report shows that countries facing conflict, insecurity, localized violence or political crisis; climate shocks and natural disasters: climate-related and natural disasters such as drought/dry spells, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes and Economic shocks such as hyperinflation, economic down turn or significant decrease in purchasing power are likely going to suffer more from food insecurity in coming years.
“Climate shocks and conflict will continue driving food insecurity and are expected once again to severely affect several regions, such as dry weather in parts of southern Africa and drought in Central America’s Dry Corridor have dampened prospects for agricultural output. El Niño conditions are likely to have an impact on agricultural production and food prices in Latin America and the Caribbean”.
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Speaking with BusinessDay, Ahmed Adekunle, CEO Nigerian Agricultural Mechanization and Equipment Leasing Company (NAMEL) said that ensuring food secuirty in Nigeria has been affected by several different factors, which range from subsequent changes in government, poor investment in agricultural produce among others as well as poor handling of government intervention prrograms.
He said “We need to improve on our investment on the farms, as most of our investment does not compliment agricultural yields, also there is need for the government to improve on strategies to ensure that the various interventions get to the grassroot farmers in order to increase their productivity and ensure food security in the nation”.
He also stressed that the subsequent changes in government hampers the journey to ensuring food security in Nigeria, “subsequent changes in government also have an effect on the productivity level, we realise that as agovernment leaves, often time their proposed programs are not sustained so there is need for consistency in government to achieve our goal of ensuring food security”
“fighting hunger is still a work in progress for us as a nation and we will get there”
However, the report indicates that ending conflicts, empowering women, nourishing and educating children, improving rural infrastructure and reinforcing social safety-nets are essential for a resilient, stable and hunger-free world as against situations where households cannot afford to access certain essential needs without engaging in coping strategies that undermine their food insecurity or ability to recover, such as compromising their food intake or selling their productive assets. Therefore, they may slip into crisis if an additional shock or stress occurs.
“While humanitarian assistance is required to save lives and livelihoods in a timely manner, long-term and resilience based interventions are important to reduce structural vulnerabilities and address root causes of hunger for those in Stressed food security conditions, allowing not only to reduce the number of people in crisis, but also to prevent other households from falling into Crisis or worse. All actors investing in resilience programming need to have the capacity to be able to absorb additional numbers as populations move back and forth between Stressed and Crisis”.
“This shows the need for simultaneous investments across the humanitarian-development nexus, along with investments in conflict prevention and sustaining peace to reduce the number of people in need of assistance. Collaborative efforts and converging programs between humanitarian and development actors would bring real progress in reducing the number of people in need, if combined with adapted financing tools to be more predictive, flexible and multi-years, allowing funding of early actions and preventive measures”.
Cynthia Egboboh, Abuja
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