Yesterday, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) commemorated the World Food Day.
Founded in 1945 on the heels of the World War II, the day was marked in over 150 countries across the world.
The theme of this year’s commemoration is: “Our Action Our Future.” Although it is also one of the most celebrated days of the United Nations calendar, the number of starving people in the world is racing close to one billion.
According to FAO’s statistics, one person out of every nine people in the world does not have enough food to lead a healthy active life.
The vast majority of the world’s hungry people live in developing countries, where 12.9 per cent of the population is undernourished.
Asia is the continent that harbours the hungriest people – two thirds of the total population or over 600m.
Sub-Saharan Africa is home to close to 300m famished people where one person out of every four people is undernourished.
Poor nutrition is also known to decimate the population of kids with nearly 45% of them below the age of five falling victim.
One out of every six children (or roughly 100m kids) in developing countries suffer weight loss from hunger and malnutrition, while one out of four of the world’s children are stunted.
It is noteworthy that the FAO has been proactive in promoting events worldwide and creating awareness and action for those who suffer hunger with a view to ensuring food security and nutritious diets for all.
The day will also offer the organisation an opportunity to show its commitment to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 aimed at achieving Zero Hunger by 2030, in view of the fact that the right to food is a basic human right.
However, the global body is under no illusion that achieving the 17 SDGs cannot happen without ending hunger, and without having sustainable and resilient, climate-compatible agriculture and food systems that deliver for the people and the planet.
We are in sync with the organisation in its drive towards achieving sustainable food systems and rural development through addressing some of the major global challenges ranging from feeding the world’s growing population to protecting the global climate, and tackling some of the root causes of migration and displacement.
Blueprint recognises that food is an indispensable need in the life of every human being.
It is necessary for growth, sustenance and nourishment.
Without food we cannot reason or even function actively.
As Nigeria joined the rest of the world in marking this year’s commemoration, its citizens should, under normal circumstances, be celebrating a good life.
Nigerians should not be among the world’s famished people.
It is blessed with abundant fertile land, excellent climate, energetic population and enormous oil wealth.
But poor leadership by avaricious and corrupt elite has ensured that there is little investment in agriculture to reduce the number of those that are hungry.
And because a hungry man is an angry man, the threat to the nation’s security and peace has been heightened in recent years.
Even on the global scene, unrest and terrorism cannot be curbed as long as one-sixth of humanity remains hungry.
Latin America and the Caribbean is perhaps the only region where hunger has been curtailed, apparently because it has been able to lure its population into farming.
Countries like Argentina, Brazil, Columbia and Cuba have enacted policies that encourage agricultural production using modern methods.
Even Venezuela that has more oil and gas deposits than Nigeria has not pushed agriculture to the backstage.
Nigeria ought to declare a state of emergency in the agric sector beyond the efforts the Buhari administration is currently making to drive his economic diversification agenda.
The population of the country is currently put at 180m with over 80 per cent living in the rural areas.
Employment generation through agriculture using modern equipment would achieve two cardinal objectives: make food available as well as income to afford it.
It is no longer debatable that hunger is mankind’s number one noncommunicable ailment, killing more people yearly than malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS combined.
Take hunger out of the people’s myriad of problems and half of them are solved.
Commemorating the annual ritual would only make sense in this country if government at all levels increases its spending in the sector and creates conducive environment for massive private sector participation.
The less the two per cent earmarked for agriculture and rural development in the 2018 budget is grossly inadequate if the federal government truly desires to achieve the economic diversification and food security it sloganeers about.
