Food crisis: Experts lament effects of post-harvest losses

Experts have attributed the current food crisis in Nigeria to post-harvest losses being suffered by farmers in different categories of production in the country.

Speaking with journalists in Ilorin, Kwara State capital, on the sidelines of a festschrift launch in honour of Professor Joseph Adepoju Akinyanju, a professor of Zoology at the University of Ilorin, Taiwo Ande added that losses in the country are not peculiar to post-harvest losses.

“Nigeria is a nation blessed with abundant resources, but post-harvest losses are not excusable. You go out to produce, end up having production, but don’t have a plan on how to utilise your production.

“The beauty is that if we can take care of post-harvest losses, rates will go down and farmers will make more money from those ones that could have been wasted.

“Post-harvest loss is the major reason why Nigeria is currently facing a food crisis. You can imagine the quantity of maize that you will get from even the low level of farming and when that quantity comes, about 50 per cent is not available to the producers.”

Professor Ande, who lamented that the results of research that had been done to curb post-harvest losses were lying fallow on the shelves, said that, “Most of these research results are in the papers. They don’t get to the end users.”

He said that post-harvest losses could be solved through research results, putting wares in the place they cannot be infected by insects, processing produce into things that cannot be destroyed.

“Most of the researches done at UNILORIN Life Sciences Faculty are looking at how to reduce such losses,” he added.

In his tribute to the honouree, former Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASSU) Chairman at UNILORIN, Professor Taiwo Oloruntoba-Oju, decried bad governance and its terrible consequences on scholarship and the masses by successive governments.

“If there had been a functional education system, with functional laboratories, equitable income and a conducive environment, scholars would simply remain in their laboratories, libraries, classrooms and study rooms. But no thoroughbred intellectual would close their eyes to the anomalies and cries of the suffering masses; to do so would be to betray their humanity and their intellectual calling,” Professor Oloruntoba-Oju said.

The event was organised by friends and academic mentees of Professor Akinyanju.

The festschrift book was entitled: ‘Advances in Biosciences’.

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