‎Food security: ‘Dependence on food aid, foreign donors‎ will not help Nigeria’

Researchers from various tertiary institutions have expressed reservations over the political will of governments in Nigeria to effectively tackle the issue of food security as manifested in the high rate of continued dependence on food aid from developed countries and foreign donors
According to them, ‎ hunger will not be removed by food aid and handouts based on the historic wisdom of a study of all starving nations across the world, both ancient and modern.
Speaking at the first International Conference on Pure and Applied Sciences of Ajayi Crowther University, Oyo, the researchers lamented that “the population numbers in Nigeria are too high compared to the available infrastructure and the welfare package on ground,” explaining that this rapid growth can limit increases in per capita income, causing poverty and hunger.
They called on the Federal Government and the different states across the federation to be more pro-active in their population control and management strategies as a veritable antidote to Food Security in the country.
The Vice Chancellor of Ajayi Crowther University, Dapo Asaju, a professor, while welcoming the team of researchers, emphasized the urgent need for scientific intervention in changing the living pattern of Nigerians to enable them to meet the yearnings of the current global challenges, to avert food crisis in the country.
Speaking in the same vein, the Local Organising Committee Chairman and Dean of the institution’s Faculty of Natural Sciences, Oyeyemi Oshin, a professor, expressed the hope that the conference would come up with enduring solutions to Nigeria’s food needs.
The guest speaker at the forum, Malachy Akoroda, a renowned agronomist from the University of Ibadan, maintained that less people or more food are the well-known equation of sufficiency, stressing that only local efforts with limited external assistance can establish a hunger-free community.
“Where people exceed food supply, widespread hunger and famine results and many may die as we have repeatedly experienced in many countries, particularly in the Horn of Africa. The complexity of the hunger debacle in Africa also incriminates many factors apparently unrelated though intricately intertwined. Population control and management are needful. There are just some levels or limits to which new houses, schools, stadia, roads, railways, airports, markets, recreation grounds can be established.
“Each country has a fixed land space. Space determines the carrying capacity as regards food production hectares. Import of food that depends on the hard earned foreign exchange is risky when funds dry up. If the human population fills her territory, migration becomes inevitable. The days of empire expansion through the power of might is long past,” he said.
Akoroda, a professor, in his presentation, ‘From Hunger and Starvation to Sufficiency: Proffering Solutions to Africa’s Predicament’, charged Nigerian governments to endeavour to abide strictly by the Maputo Declaration for African Union countries which stipulated spending at least 10 percent of their national budgets on food and agriculture, noting that this has continued to remain a mirage due to neglect, ignorance, and inaction.
“The result of not heeding such proposition has not helped us in reducing or removing hunger from Africa,” Akoroda lamented.