Food Security: How it can be improved on
Do you have cravings?
Do you wake up craving some kind of meal and then you get it because you have access to these foods?
Then you have food security.
Sadly, that is not the case for the forty percent of Nigerians who live below the poverty line.
According to the UN’s definition of food security, “Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.”
Today, there are a lot of people who do not have access to the food they need at all times, and that is because of the poor economy, but more importantly, because of the rather low investment in agriculture.
The easiest thing a man is supposed to have access to, is food.
One of the past challenges faced in agriculture was the border closure and rice inflation by local farmers in the year 2020.
There are numerous rice farms in the country, yet, local rice was N450 per derica.
Pray tell, how is a person who is living on less than a dollar per day afford cooking rice?
It is worse because this rice is grown here, yet it is costly because of the lack of infrastructure.
I am of the idea that more money needs to be pumped into the infrastructural development of the agricultural sector of the country.
We cannot keep importing foods we can grow.
There have to be more milling machines at the rice farms, digitalization of some of our processes to increase food productivity, as manpower cannot do so much.
While we try to lift Nigerians out of poverty, let us make sure that even the poor can have food security.
When there is food security, agriculture will thrive and food will be the least of the nation’s problems.
Our survival as a nation is dependent on agriculture, so we must take food security seriously.
