Expert highlights approaches to stemming food price, nutrition insecurity in households

UNICEF’s Nutrition Specialist, Mrs Ada Ezeogu has asked Nigerians to consider approaches, like backyard gardening, alternative proteins and micronutrient-rich foods and the use of local food swaps as solutions to cope with food price inflation and nutrition insecurity for low and middle-income households in Nigeria.

Ezeogu spoke at the first Oyo State Civil Society Scaling Up Nutrition in Nigeria (CS-SUNN) Professor Rasaki Sanusi’s annual public lecture with the theme “Food Price Inflation and Nutrition Security: Innovative Solutions for Low and Middle Income Households in Nigeria” in Ibadan.

Speaking through Professor Folake Samuel, Ezeogu said community bulk purchasing and food cooperatives to buffer food prices, consume more alternative protein and micronutrient-rich foods like beans and soybean and swap foods like rice with locally available ones like millet and sorghum.

Ezeogu linked high food prices to many factors, including the high cost of producing food, climate change, currency depreciation, natural disasters, insecurity and conflicts factors and declared that many households now cope by shifting to cheaper and less nutritious foods while consuming less protein, more grains and starchy staples.

She said: “Food is no longer affordable to the majority of Nigerians. So, poor dietary diversity and quality is a universal problem. Nutrient gap observed for macro and micronutrients, varying across geo-political zones, wealth quintiles and age groups.

“Our food system is deeply inequitable, not meeting up to provide comfortable access to fresh, nutritious, safe and affordable food to millions of Nigerians. Malnutrition in several forms is of public health magnitude.”

She added that to address food price inflation and its impact on nutrition, the government and communities can boost local food production by supporting farmers with farming inputs, improving food distribution, providing subsidies or cash transfers to help food production and teaching people how to grow their food.

Professor Rasaki Sanusi, a Fellow of the Nutrition Society of Nigeria declared that except Nigeria changes its strategy, the issue of malnutrition will continue despite resources spent on programmes and projects to reduce malnutrition in the country.

According to him, things missing in the past programmes and activities to reduce malnutrition include collaboration between food producers, food processors, and those who know the use of food to make healthy.

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“Several decades after, we are still talking about malnutrition. There is no collaboration for us to work more. Every one of us is in our various domains. And only if we collaborate, we’ll have results.

“There is no single food that is the best. It’s a combination of food. If I cannot eat garri egba, I can eat Garri Oyo. By the way, Garri Oyo is far better because it contains more dietary fibre which is good for us, but the other one is more palatable.”

Coordinator for Oyo State Civil Society Scaling Up Nutrition in Nigeria, Mr Olusegun Adio said the worsening problem of malnutrition requires a collective effort to tackle. According to him, “We are trying to look for innovative things that will make a difference and be able to resolve what we are going through in Nigeria. Everybody knows that there is a problem.”