FG,FAO to reposition food security towards addressing malnutrition

  

 The Federal Government ( FG) and Food and Agriculture Organization ( FAO) have recently collaborated to come up with a project tagged Nourishing Nigeria to address malnutrition and food insecurity in the country.

The new collaboration project was mentioned in a press statement made available by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security ( FMAFS) tagged " Nourishing Nigeria" yesterday to the public domain.

According to the press release, the FMAFS and FAO have held a meeting recently in Abuja to address the issue of malnutrition and food insecurity in Nigeria in a way that would conform to our national and international practices.

The Permanent Secretary ( PS) FMAFS, Dr. Marcus Ogunbiyi, in the statement, said that the project was a technical cooperation between the FG and FAO and is aimed at reviewing the entire sector to align with current national and international standards.

Dr. Ogunbiyi in the statement said that the joint collaboration would establish junior farmers' fields along with business schools to empower younger farmers at the sub-national levels with technical skills and entrepreneurial capacity to develop policies and legal framework against malnutrition and food insecurity.

The PS in the statement also emphasized that Nigeria is faced with the dual burden of malnutrition, undernutrition, and overnutrition with significant public health implications, adding that 79% of Nigerians' households experienced insecurity with reduced meal sizes and reliance on less nutritious foods.

Ogunbiyi said further that nutrition-sensitive agriculture is pivotal to combating stunting and underweight by fostering awareness of healthy diets, improving value chains for nutritious foods, and promoting enabling diverse food production at household levels.

The Chairman House Committee on Food and Nutrition, Hon. John Chike Okafor also stated in the press release that the initiative was timely, and it is aligned with the core mandate of the committee, which was to provide a very robust legislative support to the executive arms of government to fight malnutrition and food insecurity.

Also in the press statement, the FAO Country Representative, Dominique Koffy Kouacou, who was represented by the Programme Officer, Tofiq Braimag stated that the organization in collaboration with the Ministry and the House Committee on Food and Nutrition is launching the technical cooperation programme “Nourishing Nigeria”, an initiative that seeks to confront the challenges of malnutrition and food insecurity in the country by paring nutrition sensitive approaches into agricultural planning, implementation and policy.