Success Damian:
The 10th Lagos State University Public Lecture, headlined
by the School of Agriculture, held recently, with expert calling on the
government to put in place the necessary infrastructure to solve the problem of
food wastage in order to arrest the country's slide into food crisis.
The public lecture which had as its theme:
"Challenges and Opportunities for Ensuring Food Safety in Post Covid-19
Era" was delivered by four distinguished speakers- Prof. Adegbola Tolulope
Adesogan, Dr. Adebimpe Abraham Onifade, Dr. Sunday Oluseyi Akinyemi and Dr.
Khadeejah O. Kareem-Ibrahim, with the Acting Dean, School of Agriculture, Prof.
Olatunji Abanikanda as Moderator.
The lecture took place via the zoom platform with over 100
participants and had the Vice Chancellor, Prof. Olanrewaju Fagbohun, SAN, NPOM
as Chief Host.
Professor of Animal Nutrition, and Director, Livestock
Systems Innovation Lab, Institute of Food and Agriculture Sciences, University
of Florida, Prof. Adegbola Adesogan, in his lecture titled "Global Food
Disruptions Caused by Covid-19 and Changes Needed to Prevent Future
Occurrences" revealed that one of the biggest challenges facing the world
in the wake of the Covid-19 Pandemic is food crisis, which is brought
about, not by lack of food, but the accessibility to, and affordability of it.
He said the pandemic has disrupted both the demand for and the supply of food
leading to a surge in the cost of food items in many parts of the world.
"Covid-19 has disrupted the food chain such that
lockdowns, failing income, increase in cost of food, reduced access to the
market and myths about food borne transmission forced down the demand for food
while disruption to the food value chain, transportation and economic
restriction, export bans and lack of labour have forced a dip in food
supply.
"This has led to a situation where many countries are
experiencing unprecedented increase in food prices with pervasive hunger in
many third world nations.
"Conversely, there is tremendous food wastage in some
parts of the world where factories, schools and markets shutdown is forcing
manufacturers to get rid of unsold products."
He added that the Covid-19 food crisis coincides with the
worst locust outbreak in Africa in 70 years, armed conflicts leading to the
displacement of millions and climatic/weather shock all of which foretells an
impending food crisis in some nations of the world, which he termed Food Security
Hotspots, including Yemen, DR Congo, Venezuela, Syria and Nigeria. He added
that 260 million people are now at the risk of starvation as against 160
million people before the pandemic.
To tackle the impending problem of food shortage, Prof.
Adesogan recommended that government should stabilize food prizes, subsidize
prices of nutrients rich foods, increase income support, food aid and social
protection for the needy, improve infrastructure for food distribution and
storage and sow seeds of recovery by providing support for farmers, promoting
trade and food movements by careful reopening of the borders, markets and
restaurants, amongst others.
To prevent risk of future occurrences, the US based Food
Nutritionist urged the government to provide support for research and
development initiatives, raise awareness about best management and sanitation
practices and, facilitate greater national, regional and international
coordination and partnerships.
Dr. Adebimpe Onifade, the Managing Partner, Echo Consulting
Group, New Jersey, USA, who spoke on the topic: "Agriculture: a Largely
Unexplored Wealth Builder" started by reminding the participants that
photosynthesis, gotten from sunlight, is the primary source of food for all
living things as it gives us food chain. Without photosynthesis, he concluded
that there is no life, adding that there is relationship between breath, health
and wealth.
Dr. Onifade went on to view wealth, in relation to the
topic, as a livelihood that is scalable to attain food security, that is,
being food sufficient, and being able to live a profitable life.
"Wealth in this context is not equal to having plenty
of money but being food secure. Wealthy nations are food secure. Food and
access to food is a national policy in such nations.
"There is huge wealth in agriculture. From the input
to process to output stages of agriculture, money is being made."
He enthused that even though Nigeria is far from it, the
country is capable of achieving wealth and food security with some refocusing,
realignment and repurposing. He further advocated that the length and content
of training being offered by schools to practitioners should be re-examined
with more focus on practical and apprenticeship programmes and less on unduly
long years of theory.
"Food is critical to survival so Agriculture is a
wealth, but I don't know the mechanics behind it. And even though it is a risky
business, Science, Technology and new methods of doing things are giving better
ways to control agricultural input, process and output.", he said.
Dr. Onifade listed training of future graduates on
how to commercialize agriculture, revision of agriculture curriculum, making of
courses in agriculture short and compulsory for all students, and emphasis on
apprenticeship as the way forward.
The third speaker, Dr. S.O.S Akinyemi, who is the Director
of Research, National Horticultural Research Institute, Ibadan, spoke on
"Improving the Plantain/Banana Value Chain. In his lecture, he
corroborated the first two speakers on the need to support farmers and put in
place the necessary infrastructure to prevent wastage using Plantain and Banana
production in Nigeria as an example.
He revealed that the country is one of the top producers
of the plantain and banana in the world, producing 3.2 million metric tons of
the crops annually (according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
2017 Report), but sadly, does not export the produce to international markets,
due largely to the problems earlier identified.
He explained that if harnessed, plantain/banana has the
potential to be a huge income earner for individual farmers and the government,
identifying the value chain and money making stages of banana and plantain as
planting, orchard management, harvesting and bunch sales or processing.
According to him, as far as banana/plantain production are
concerned, " Covid-19 has revealed to us that the major want of man is
food; dry spell and rainfall delay have hampered the available quantity of the
produce this year; plantain/banana products and its bye products are therefore
not available in sufficient quantity in the market, meanwhile there has been an
abundance of the products just a few months before the pandemic with associated
waste and low price.
"What this has taught us is that the country always
has an abundance of these crops in their season and scarcity in off season;
lockdown has more impact on cities than villages; there is need for improved
cropping and farming system and value addition, because lack of proper
storage and low shelf life will continue to affect quality of products",
he said.
He concluded by reiterating the need for proper education,
which might include a change in curriculum, investment in demand-driven and
practical research, provision of adequate market information and most
importantly, the need to entrench good governance, which is the precursor of
security, infrastructural development and provision of social amenities.
In her lecture titled "Curbing Post- Harvest Losses
in Agriculture", a lecturer in the Department of Animal Science, School of
Agriculture, Lagos State University, Dr. K.O Kareem-Ibrahim warned that food security
is one of the biggest challenges currently confronting the world and added that
food production has to grow by 70% to cater for the world population, which is
predicted to reach 10.5 billion people by 2050.
"One of the major ways of strengthening food security
is by reducing food losses; food wastage in tropical weather such as Nigeria is
as high as 40-50% according to FIIRO (2017)", she said, describing
Post-Harvest Loss (PHL) as measurable, quantitative and qualitative food loss
in post-harvest system, comprising interconnected activities from the time of
harvest through processing, marketing and food preparation."
She listed post-harvest handling, inadequate social
infrastructure, lack of storage and processing facilities, seasonal farming,
inadequate market information, and reduced use of relevance technologies as
causes of post-harvest loss.
On the way forward, she believed that: growing varieties
of crops that are tolerant to the prevailing climatic conditions, adopting
better agronomic practices that increase soil moisture -holding capacity, soil
erosion protection measures, enhancing mechanized farming, practising proper
post-harvest handling and investing in integrated farming, are solutions
against food wastage. She added that government must provide the necessary
infrastructure and policies to back the efforts of farmers up, while
individuals ensure they reduce food wastage as much as they can.
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