Without value addition, agriculture will remain rudimentary, food security unachievable ― FUTA don

To attain sustainable food security, farmers must be guided to imbibe and practise value addition, which will ultimately increase their earning and prevent rip-off by middlemen who buy off their products cheaply and resell for profit.

A Professor of Food Process Technology and Product Development, Mathew Oluwamukomi, made the submission while delivering the 139th Inaugural Lecture of the Federal University of Technology, Akure, on Tuesday.

Professor Oluwamukomi who spoke on the topic, ‘Value Addition: A Sine Qua Non for Sustainable Food and Health Security’, defined value addition as the process of increasing the economic value and consumer appeal to a community by taking a raw product to at least the next stage of production.

He said: “The value of farm products can be increased in endless ways: by cleaning and cooling, packaging, processing, distributing, cooking, combining, churning, grinding, dehulling, extracting, drying, smoking, handcrafting, spinning, weaving, labelling, or packaging.

He frowned on buying-off of agricultural products by middlemen, who he said rob farmers the chance of enjoying the real benefits of their labour.”

“After harvesting, farmers sell their produce to middlemen who will eventually sell the produce to the processing industries or consumers. The majority of crops in this country are marketed in their raw forms, thereby losing opportunities for higher earnings and the ability to generate employment.

“Farmers are the most important actors in the food value chain, yet they are the least paid when compared to the other actors in the system. As a result of this, a lot of revenue coming to the farm system is captured by those in downstream of the value chain rather than upstream.

“There is a need for farmers and food producers to understand the importance of value addition to improve on their income generation,” Oluwamukomi said.

Dwelling on the health aspect of food security, the don said, “The number of hungry people in the world continues to increase with about 10 per cent of the world’s population or 734 million people living on less than $1.90 a day.”

He added that the Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG 2 or Global Goal 2) of the United Nations aims to achieve ‘zero hunger’ but the United Nations (2017) report shows that one in every nine people goes to bed hungry each night, including 20 million people currently facing the risk of famine in some countries.

He also noted that the COVID-19 pandemic and resultant lockdown had placed huge pressure on agricultural production, disrupted global value and supply chain and resulted in social and economic disruption, which exacerbated issues of malnutrition and inadequate food supply to households.

The Isan Ekiti-born don and one-time Principal Lecturer at the Rufus Giwa Polytechnic, Owo, said there is a significant relationship between value addition and food processing.

According to him, food processing is the process of transforming a food raw material into products, while value addition is a means of adding nutrients and/or other ingredients to the product to increase its value.

“In my research effort to improve the nutritional qualities of local food items, I found out that using the appropriate method of processing and preservation will influence the quality and final product,” he said.

He emphasized the importance of storage stability and shelf-life prediction in value addition programmes.

The don, currently the pro-chancellor and chairman, the governing council of the Federal Polytechnic, Idah, Kogi State, called on governments to invest more in the agricultural and food value chain through an increase in budgetary allocation to agriculture annually.

He also made a case for more funds for research in Nigerian universities, polytechnics, and research institutes for the development of a more robust agriculture and food value chain, adding that Nigerian students should be more exposed to practical and industrial training.

Other recommendations by the don include increased food and nutrition intervention programmes with collaboration with international bodies like the United Nations International Children Education Fund (UNICEF), the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO); encouragement, mobilization and organization of food safety and health security campaigns to educate people on the importance of food safety and health security; as well as appropriate legal framework for the proper implementation of the food safety regulations and control.

He also urged the government to tackle holistically the issue of herdsmen/farmers clashes, kidnapping and banditry which has increased the cost of living because many farmers have abandoned their farms due to insecurity of lives and properties.

The chairman at the event and FUTA vice-chancellor, Professor Joseph Fuwape, represented by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Development, Professor Philip Oguntunde, described the topic as apt with the global challenge of food insecurity.

He said the lecture had further educated farmers on how to manage their produce for further yields and profit.

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