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.

Cyriacus Nnaji/GEE

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70% of world population without social protections - UN

NaijaAgroNet:

Aftermath of the global economic crisis, it has been discovered that over 70 per cent of the world population is without proper social protections, says United Nations labour agency, the International Labour Organisation (ILO), reports NaijaAgroNet.

ILO in an executive summary of the report made available to NaijaAgroNet.urged governments to scale up investment in child and family benefits, pensions and other public expenditures.

Sandra Polaski, the Deputy Director-General of the International Labour Organization (ILO) made this disclosure, saying that the global community agreed in 1948 that social security and health care for children, working age people who face unemployment or injury and older persons are a universal human right.

“And yet in 2014 the promise of universal social protection remains unfilled for the large majority of the world’s population,” she lamented.

Equally, NaijaAgroNet gathered that as many as 122 governments were contracting public expenditures in 2014, of which 82 are developing countries, according to the findings of the World Social Protection Report 2014/15: Building economic recovery, inclusive development and social justice.

“The case for social protection is even more compelling in these times of economic uncertainty, low growth and increased inequality,” Ms. Polaski noted, adding that it is also an issue that the international community should embrace prominently in the development agenda following the Millennium Development Goals deadline in 2015.

At the beginning of the 2008-2009 economic crisis, at least 48 high- and middle-income countries put in place stimulus packages totalling $2.4 trillion that devoted roughly a quarter to social protection measures.

This support “acted as an automatic stabilizer that helped the economies to regain balance and protected the unemployed and vulnerable from economic disaster in the countries where it was extended,” according to the report.

But from 2010 onwards, many governments reversed course and embarked prematurely on fiscal consolidation, despite the urgent need to continue supporting vulnerable populations and stabilizing consumption.

Isaac Oyimah/GEE

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