TAKING THE HUNGER ALERT SERIOUSLY
The authorities must do more to prevent mass starvation
More than 17 million people across nine conflict-hit states in northern Nigeria face severe hunger, according to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). The UN agency has warned on how violence and funding cuts are driving food insecurity to its worst level in nearly a decade. Borno State, the epicentre of the Boko Haram insurgency, has more than three million people who are acutely food insecure, including more than 750,000 facing severe hunger conditions. “When people lose access to food, the risks of displacement, exploitation and instability increase,” said WFP regional director for West and Central Africa, Kinday Samba, who added that violence was spreading across a wider area and forcing people from farmland.
For years, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the UNWFP have warned repeatedly that millions of Nigerians are at the risk of hunger as prices of foodstuff skyrocket. Recent data compiled by an international e-commerce organisation also revealed that the average Nigerian household spends about 60 per cent of its income on food, one of the highest in the world. But the situation in the Northeast states, especially Borno, Adamawa and Yobe, has always posed more challenges because of the brutal insurgency that has decimated the region for almost two decades.
Insecurity in many rural communities in Nigeria has made it practically difficult for farmers to engage in agricultural production optimally, thus affecting productivity and largely causing market disruptions with attendant food price shocks. Available projections from Cadre Harmonisé, an initiative focused on food and nutrition analysis, indicate a high level of desperation, especially in the North. “People have been forced to adopt negative coping mechanisms such as survival sex and child labour to stay alive,” according to the head of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Nigeria, Trond Jensen. “Over the past year, dozens of farmers have lost their lives, and others have been abducted or injured while eking out a living outside the security perimeters of Borno’s garrison towns due to limited farming lands and few or no livelihood options.”
The WFP findings underline the deepening humanitarian cost of insecurity in a region where armed groups have displaced communities, kept farmers from their fields, and restricted aid access. The crisis, according to the food agency, isworsening during the lean season, when households typically exhaust foodstocks before the next harvest. With the fear of malnutrition for millions of children (and mothers) who are deprived of a healthy and productive life, the situation is already dire. We therefore urge authorities, at all levels, to work towards alleviating the problem of hunger in the country.
Even before the latest WFP warning, the last National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) report titled, ‘Nigeria General Household Survey (Wave 5)’ revealed that approximately two out of three households indicated being unable to eat healthy, nutritious or preferred foods because of lack of money. Similarly, 63.8 per cent of households ate only a few kinds of food due to lack of money; 62.4 per cent were worried about not having enough food to eat, and 60.5 per cent ate less than they thought they should. Between Waves 4 and 5 surveys (conducted three years apart), the proportion of households that reported being worried about not having enough food to eat because of lack of money increased from 36.9 per cent to 62.4 per cent. Between then and now, the only change is perhaps that the situation has got worse.
It is a notorious fact that food inflation and attendant food prices have escalated in the last three years not only in the north but across the country with hunger now a daily vocabulary. This is a challenge that should compel urgent attention by authorities at all levels in Nigeria.