The World Food Day was created by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations in 1979, with the sole purpose to create awareness of world hunger and encourage action to fight against.
Each year’s celebration comes with a striking theme that is aimed at tackling and solving a food crisis. This year’ s theme being “Water is Life, Water is Food. Leave No One Behind”, aims at highlighting the critical role of water for life on earth and water as the foundation of our food.
As Nigeria joins the rest of the world to mark the “World Food Day” the food crisis and hunger that is spreading like a wild fire across the country, forcing many to begging for alms and some endulge in criminal acts just to have a meal.
It is not a debate that food is an essential commodity for survival and has to be taken seriously.
Reports has it that Nigeria spent 8.20 trillion on imports between 2016 and 2021 and agricultural imports account for 7.88% of the total imports.
Despite the measures claimed by the governments to have been put in place to curb importation of goods especially food stuff, a total of N6.47 trillion have been spent between 2016 and 2021 on importation of agricultural products like wheat, sugar, fish, milk, rice and others.
However, Nigeria was the world’s biggest exporter of Cocoa Shells ($8.56M) in 2021, this is not encouraging regardless.
Although climate change issues have impacted negatively on food production globally, however, years of neglect of the agricultural sector and over dependence on imported food items have worsened Nigeria’s situation.
Worse still, the rate of the constant rise in foreign exchange is quite alarming. On Thursday, the 12th of October, the naira exchange for the dollar at the parallel market was between 1,005/$ and 1,025/$ .
Where the former president Bhari led administration’s food security and five-point plan on food security taken Nigeria to, let us not forget the ban on imports and other measures put in place to promote and foster home grown food stuff.
All of these measures rather brought untold hardship and increased hunger and starvation.
The situation and low standard of living in the country has led to the increase of Nigerians migrating in search of greener pastures, also alias japa, with those left behind wondering if the government is aware of their conditions. The 2023 ”World Food Day” is been celebrated with mixed feelings as Nigerians call on the federal, state and local government, stakeholders and NGOs in the agricultural sector to put in measures quickly to
