WFD 2024: Makinde reveals 'what we're doing to boost food security' - NaijaAgroNet

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The Oyo State Governor, 'Seyi Makinde, has declared that his government will not relent in its effort to boost food security and safe functioning of the food supply chain in the state.

He maintained that the government has taken several steps to promote agriculture and ensure food security in the state, including providing support to thousands of smallholder farmers and farmers' associations.

Food security: Oyo to partner IITA - ITREALMS

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Oyo State governor, ‘Seyi Makinde, has expressed the readiness of his administration to collaborate with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) to ensure food security in the state.

Governor Makinde stated this on Tuesday, while receiving the Director-General of the IITA and CGIAR Regional Director, Continental Africa, Dr. Simeon Ehui and his team at the Courtesy Room of the Governor’s Office.

Food security: Pope Francis donates to FAO

NaijaAgroNet:

The Catholic pontiff, Pope Francis, in an unprecedented move, has symbolically donated €25,000 to the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO's) efforts supporting people facing food insecurity and famine in East Africa, reports NaijaAgroNet.

Pope Francis said the funds are "a symbolic contribution to an FAO programme that provides seeds to rural families in areas affected by the combined effects of conflicts and drought."

The pontiff's remarks were contained in a letter to FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva by Monsignor Fernando Chica Arellano, Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the UN food agencies in Rome.

Pope Francis' gesture stemmed from a pledge he made in a message to FAO's Conference on 3 July 2017 and was "inspired also by the desire to encourage Governments," Monsignor Chica wrote in the letter.

Famine was declared in parts of South Sudan in February and while the situation has eased after a significant scaling up in the humanitarian response, some 6 million people in the country are still struggling to find enough food every day.

Meanwhile the number of people in need of humanitarian assistance in five other East African countries - Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda - is currently estimated at about 16 million, which marks an increase of about 30 percent since late 2016.

Pope Francis, who has made solidarity a major theme of his pontificate, is set to visit FAO's headquarters on 16 October to mark World Food Day. This year the event is being held under the slogan: "Change the future of migration. Invest in food security and rural development".

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Water, fundamental for food security in North Africa, Near East

NaijaAgroNet:

Access to water is a fundamental need for food security, human health and agriculture, and its looming scarcity in the North Africa and Middle East region, reports NaijaAgroNet.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva said in Cairo, that this is a huge challenge requiring an "urgent and massive response."

Accessible fresh water in the region, he said, has fallen by two-thirds in the past 40 years.

“It now amounts to 10 times less per capita availability than the worldwide average, underscoring the need for a significant overhaul of farming systems, he said.

NaijaAgroNet gathered that a recent study by FAO showed that higher temperatures may shorten growing seasons in the region by 18 days and reduce agricultural yields a further 27 per cent to 55 per cent less by the end of this century.

The rising sea level in the Nile Delta, FAO said, is exposing Egypt to the danger of losing substantial parts of the most productive agriculture land due to salinization.

"Competition between water-usage sectors will only intensify in the future between agriculture, energy, industrial production and household needs," he said.

Graziano da Silva attended a high-level meeting covering FAO's collaboration with Egypt on the ‘1.5 million feddan initiative', the government's plan to reclaim eventually up to two million hectares of desert land for agricultural and other uses.

He expressed his strong support to the Egyptian Authorities and committed to back programmes aiming at addressing water scarcity and promoting climate resilient agriculture.

The Director-General's visit to Egypt included meetings with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, Agriculture and Land Reclamation, Investment and International Cooperation, as well as the Secretary General of the League of Arab States.

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Food Security: Transforming toilet waste to table water

NaijaAgroNet: 

Given the increasing competition over water usage, how can it be ensured that agriculture has access to water, and hence can provide the global population with food? What part can agriculture, as the largest user of water, play worldwide in the sustainable stewardship of water as a valuable resource?

With existing fresh water resources becoming limited and over-exploited, climate change and water scarcity are ranking high among the biggest global challenges. Therefore, farmers have to look for alternative ways of covering their needs – like using wastewater.

Wastewater is a valuable, and still in many countries untapped resource, which can help the agriculture, agroforestry and forestry sectors achieve food security and move towards climate change adaptation. 

However, wastewater used in agricultural fields often does not meet the required water quality criteria, let it be from the perspective of the farmers’ health and/or agricultural practices (e.g. high turbidity causing the clogging of irrigation pipes).

In the frame of the panel experts from different regions and organizations will discuss the current status of wastewater application in agriculture, its importance for achieving food security, existing challenges, relevance with SDG targets and ultimately the future steps forward.

Improved and affordable mechanisms and state of the art technologies for expanding collection, treatment and safe application of wastewater in agriculture and agroforestry sector might be applied for water scarcity adaptation.

These would not only:

(1) contribute to the country’s food security significantly, and

(2) help cope with climate change sustainably, but also

(3) protect farmers’ health by assuring that treated wastewater being applied in the field is also safe. The latter would also contribute

(4) to the farmer’s income, as well as

(5) reduce the amount of pollution produced by agriculture through replacing a significant amount of fertilizer with nutrients recovered from the wastewater (e.g. nitrate).

Finally new systems could (6) reduce the total water usage, by implementing a stable water-wastewater-circle that sustains several protagonists with hardly any external influences. However, these aims cannot be achieved without proper water pricing policies and sensitization of the public.

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N8 Research Partnership to explore food security, agritech

NaijaAgroNet:

The Chairman of the N8 Research Partnership and Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of York, Professor Koen Lamberts, has said that the collaboration is a fantastic agrifood opportunity to explore food security, agritech and consumer health, reports NaijaAgroNet.

Speaking at the recently launched N8 Research Partnership comprising Manchester, Durham, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, Sheffield and York Universities, Prof. Lamberts told NaijaAgroNet in a press statement by Joe Paxton, from the Media Relations Office, The University of Manchester said they will focus on solutions on agritech and food security.

“The launch of N8 AgriFood is a fantastic opportunity to explore new projects and solutions to the main food security, agritech and consumer health issues across the supply chain," Prof. Lamberts said.

He revealed that the N8 would facilitate academics and researchers to collaborate closely with industry, farmers and the government, and aims at solving the global challenge of ensuring sustainable, resilient and healthy food supplies for everyone.

Keynote speakers at the launch held between June 21 and 22 at Manchester, UK, included Professor Ian Noble, Senior R&D Director at PepsiCo; Professor Ian Boyd, Chief Scientific Adviser for Defra; Tim Benton, UK Champion for Global Food Security; Keith Gill, food industry pioneer and founder of Phileas Fogg crisps and Dr Emma Hennessey, Head of the Science and Innovation team at the Foreign Office.

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Pix: Prof. Koen Lamberts

Food security: UN, EU launch global network for joint assessments, coordinated action

NaijaAgroNet:

A new network to achieve joint global food-security assessments and joint responses to food crises, including those related to phenomena such as El Niño, was launched in Istanbul Monday by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and the European Union, reports NaijaAgroNet.

The Global Network for Food Insecurity, Risk Reduction and Food Crises Response, NaijaAgroNet gathered, would pave the way for enhancing the impact of future responses to food crises at the global level by regularly producing, in real time, joint reports based on key analyses and containing timely response options.

According to FAO, this will prompt coordination among stakeholders and promote joint planning and joint responses to food crises, in addition, to improving learning from past crises and increase the level of transparency and availability of crucial analysis of global needs.

The "Global Network" and its outputs are public goods, available for everybody. Participation in the network will be broadened to all key stakeholders that can contribute to the analysis and/or to the response. The network’s pilot publication “Global analysis of food and nutrition security situation in food crisis hotspots 2016” is the example that a joint analysis is possible. It covers 70 countries affected by a food crisis in 2015, including chronically vulnerable countries at or above Phase 2 of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). 

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Legumes important crops for food security - FAO boss

NaijaAgroNet:

The Director General, Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), José Graziano da Silva, has said that legumes are important crops for food security of a good part of world population, NaijaAgroNet reports.

Silva made this statement while announcing 2016 as International Year of Legumes, with beans in the leading role. Under the slogan Nutritional Seeds for a Sustainable Future, it will deal with an international campaign to raise awareness of its benefits and promote its production and trade, besides encouraging new and more intelligent uses in all the food chain for their protein content and its health benefits.

According to FAO there are hundreds of varieties of legumes all over the world and says the most popular of its dry bean varieties like the haricot beans, Lima beans and little beans, besides chick peas and coupes.

Graziano da Silva underlined the fixing nitrogen properties of legumes that can improve soil fertility, increasing at the same time the productivity of arable lands, which also raises productivity of the lands and eliminates dependency on synthetic fertilizers, NaijaAgroNet gathered.

Such conditions lead to a lesser trail of carbon and, indirectly, to less emission of greenhouse gases, he assured.

The UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, in a communique read in his name during the ceremony of presentation, NaijaAgroNet learnt, expressed the view that legumes may contribute significantly to treat hunger, food security, malnutrition, environmental challenges and human health.

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AGRA report links under-25 unemployment, food insecurity

NaijaAgroNet:

The 2015 African Agriculture Status Report's co-ordinating editor and head, strategy, monitoring and evaluation, David Sarfo Ameyaw, has said that the report highlighted a direct link between rising level of unemployment among the under-25s and food security concerns, NaijaAgroNet reports.

The report also said modernising Africa's agriculture sector to attract young people will help tackle youth unemployment and food insecurity, warning that the continent will not solve its chronic food shortages or worrying unemployment levels among its youth without wholesale changes.

"Channelling the energy, strength and dynamism of Africa's youth into productive, competitive and profitable agribusinesses will boost agricultural production systems, create jobs and generate incomes. The impact of youth involvement and participation in agriculture and food systems will be seen in sustainable economic growth and in the reduction of poverty and malnutrition across the continent," he said.

He told BBC News that studies had shown that a 1 per cent increase in GDP from the agriculture sector reduces poverty five times as much as any other sector. However, there were a number of long-standing barriers that prevented or deterred future generations of would-be agribusiness leaders.

One was the lack of access to land. "Africa has the highest area of arable land in the world but because of the limitation of our land-tenure systems and land policies, it is very difficult for the youth to access land," Ameyaw explained.

Another constraint was accessing finance facilities. "The report points out that only about 25 per cent of the young people in Africa have any form of access to finance, even things such as a bank account or credit card."

Dr Sarfo Ameyaw said, along with reforms to the barriers and constraints identified by the report, there was also a need to "rebrand" the image of farming and the opportunities for employment the sector offered, NaijaAgroNet gathered.

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Liberia to analyze food, nutrition security using Cadre Harmonise ‘e’

NaijaAgroNet

The Executive Director, food security and nutrition unit, Ministry of Agriculture, Liberia, Deroe A. Weeks, said Cadre Harmonise ‘e’ is meant to analyze food and nutrition security, NaijaAgroNet reports.

She said this recently at a week-long workshop in Monrovia, adding that the national workshop was intended to analyze food and nutrition security using the Cadre Harmonise ‘e’ as a regional tool even as Liberia has joined 14 other countries in the Sahel and West Africa to work towards the adoption of the tool to tackle food and nutrition insecurity.

According to Weeks, the tool will help Liberia in terms of data collection and the documentation of the country's food and nutrition security and insecurity situations.
She explained that Liberia does not have hands-on data in terms of reporting food and nutrition insecurity and that the application of the regional tool will only enable the country be on track and collect data that will not be unique to other regional countries that are already using the Cadre Harmonise ‘e’ tool.

ALL AFRICA.COM reports that the Cadre Harmonise implementation process in the Sahel and West Africa has been fully underway and creates the country's ownership and occupies a strategic position among the various regional tools and will be used in the CILSS-ECOWAS-UEMOA region as a trigger tool of regional food reserve.

Dr. Charles McClain who represented the Agriculture Minister,  ITRealms gathered, thanked the participants and said as lead institution, the MoA is interested in getting more analytical data as the process moves on.

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 Pix: Deroe A. Weeks,

Agriculture, food security, prudent management vital in SADC region

NaijaAgroNet

The Director of Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources at the Southern African Development Community ( SADC), Ms Margaret Nyirenda, said agriculture, food security and prudent management of natural resources are vital in SADC region, NaijaAgroNet reports.

She said that food production in most parts of the region was hampered by unfavourable climatic conditions, increase in population, poor health and sanitation, adding that SADC is facing a cereal deficit of over six million tonnes emanating from the poor rainfall and floods that befell the region in the 2014/2015 season.

Nyirenda was addressing the 35th Ordinary Summit of Heads of States and Government in Gaborone. She said the 2014/2015 rainfall season was poor in most parts of the region with prolonged dry spells in Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, southern Angola and Zimbabwe,  gathered NaijaAgroNet.

She added that Madagascar, Malawi and Mozambique experienced both floods and prolonged dry spells and that the poor rainfall led to an unsatisfactory regional food security situation for the 2015/2016 year.

Ms Nyirenda, NaijaAgroNet learnt,  said the deficit of 6.33 million tonnes of cereal include the five most consumed cereals in the region such as maize, wheat, rice, millet and sorghum compared to a surplus of 1.21 million tonnes in the 2014/15 year .

She said the regional cereal availability for the 2015/16 was estimated at 40.23 million tonnes representing a drop of 22 per cent from 45.62 million tonnes last year. Ms Nyirenda added that the requirement for the region this year was estimated at 32.93 million tonnes, reflecting an overall maize deficit of 1.20 million tonnes.

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Pix: Ms Margaret Nyirenda,

Food crisis looms in Namibia

NaijaAgroNet

A major food crisis may occur in the northern communal areas of Namibia by the end of August, says the Crop Prospects, Food Security and Drought Situation Report, NaijaAgroNet can authoritatively reveal.

This has prompted Namibian government to contemplate importation of about 210 000 tonnes of cereal to ensure food security to cushion effects of the 2013 and 2015 droughts which occasioned poor harvests in these regions.

NaijaAgroNet also reports that sections of the country worse affected by the drought were the Kavango East and Kavango West regions which indicate a reduction of 80per cent below average and 73per cent lower than last season’s harvest.

As a country, NaijaAgroNet gathered, the national coarse aggregate production (maize, millet, sorghum and wheat) is estimated at 67 800 tonnes, reflecting a substantial decrease in the harvest of about 46 per cent below the average production and 49 per cent lower than last season’s harvest.

The report states that although maize production in the commercial areas recorded about 36 700 tonnes this season, over 92 per cent of this total came from irrigation projects, and dry land maize only contributed about 8 per cent of the total, while Pearl millet production showed a decrease of over 74 per cent below average and 65 per cent less than last season, NaijaAgroNet learnt.

“Sorghum production has also showed a significant decrease and is estimated at 79 per cent below the average production and 60 per cent lower than last season. Wheat is a winter crop and production thereof is ongoing. The harvest estimate for wheat is provisionally forecast at 12 700 tonnes. This reflects an increase of 21per cent above the average production and 23 per cent higher than last season,” the report says.

 “In contrast, the current domestic cereal domestic availability is only about 28 per cent of the cereal requirements; hence a shortfall of 234 000 tonnes is required to cover the shortfall. This consists of 59 800 tonnes of wheat, 118 100 tonnes of maize and 56 100 tonnes of pearl millet and sorghum.”

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Buhari urged to increase allocation to agriculture

  NaijaAgroNet

The president-elect, General Muhammadu Buhari (retd) has been advised by a concerned Nigerian to ensure that agriculture received a good chunk of budgetary allocation to boost food security, reports NaijaAgroNet.

Mr. Seyi Adebowale, an agriculturalist and the Director of Sophix Farms, Omu-Aran, Kwara State, made this call during an interview with news men in Omu-Aran.

In his word, "The incoming government led by the President-elect, Maj.-Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, needs a strong political will to take decisive steps to develop the agriculture sector. The challenges of inadequate budgetary allocation and lack of awareness on viability of agriculture to solve our domestic food crisis are issues requiring priority attention," he said.

NaijaAgroNet further learnt that the agriculturalist also faulted the negative disposition of government officials, bankers, entrepreneurs and investors to agriculture, adding that, "The major stumbling block against development in agriculture today is as a result of the wrong mind-set that government officials, bankers, entrepreneurs and investors have about the sector.”

He stated that he had heard bankers and investors saying that they cannot invest in agriculture because of the risk involved and noted that such trend remained a stumbling block to develop the sector.

Adebowale expressed the urgent need for a re-ordering of priorities by stakeholders in the nation's economy towards embracing land policy to boost agricultural production, NaijaAgroNet gathered.

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C.A.R: FAO warns on potential food security crisis

NaijaAgroNet:

The continuous security situation in the Central African Republic (CAR) is giving the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) some nightmares, hence it warned on the potential food security crisis in the country.

NaijaAgroNet reports that FAO says that despite security challenges in half of the prefectures, farmers in the Central African Republic are counting on the next agriculture season to restore their food production capacity to avoid risks of famine and malnutrition.

NaijaAgroNet recalls that since last year when they had to flee the violence, farming communities had to abandon their fields along the main roads to replant deep in the bush.

This disruption, experts say has led them to produce much less than previous years with a major impact on their food reserves that will last till February instead of July 2014.

NaijaAgroNet gathered that FAO of the United Nations is already working to provide farmers with seeds and tools for the next campaign however more funds are needed for the food security component of the 100-day response plan.

According to NaijaAgroNet, the initial assessments conducted in the past weeks indicated a deteriorating situation in terms of low food stocks, widespread disruption to village food markets and a lack of purchasing power overall among other issues.

Acting FAO Representative in the Central African Republic, Alexis Bonte, who recently visited Bossangoa revealed to NaijaAgroNet that the combination of food shortages and poor sanitary conditions in the camps and deep in the bush, as well as extreme poverty, risk triggering serious malnutrition.

The success of the next planting season Bonte noted is crucially hinging on the return of farming families to the fields, stressing that families who are unable to plant in March will have to wait one whole year before they could hope to harvest again.

“Failure to help these families will have dramatic consequences on the food security for a quarter of the Central African population. The low production perceived from the last harvest coupled with a prevailing situation of chronic country-wide malnutrition is setting the stage for a full scale food and nutrition security crisis should the next planting season fail, reports the Organization today,” FAO official said.

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