Food Security challenges: Please keep it up

Apart from what I regard as your Corporate Social Responsibility in organizing interactive forums in your paper the Daily Trust and particularly devoting pages to agriculture and food issues, I am tempted to plead with you to kindly use such forum to help actualize the establishment of a National Fund for Agro Processing and a […]

Apart from what I regard as your Corporate Social Responsibility in organizing interactive forums in your paper the Daily Trust and particularly devoting pages to agriculture and food issues, I am tempted to plead with you to kindly use such forum to help actualize the establishment of a National Fund for Agro Processing and a Nutrition Policy for Nigeria.  Suffice it to say, the quality-quantity  of  staple, cash crops, fruits and vegetables, animals, fish and poultry we produce, use and eat, is a vital development indicator for assessing our well being and economic prosperity as a nation. To underscore my appeal, I wish to cite two important stories published recently by your paper.
On Saturday, January 2, 2016, your paper at page 60, published an interesting article by one Mr. Barau Emmanuel, under the title “Before You Put That Food In Your Mouth”. He said among other things that “The increasing association of cancer and other chronic diseases with diets, demands an approach that puts nutrition at the center of national planning and development. It is a policy move that has the double-edged advantage of boosting local economy, while promoting good health for a productive workforce that will catalyze the country’s acceleration from its present state.”  About two weeks later, Wednesday, January 20, 2016 at page 12, your paper again, published a very similar and weighty story. This time Honorable Abubakar Yunusa Ahmad (APC Gombe) sponsored a bill for the establishment of the Nigeria Agro-Processing and Food Safety Commission before his colleagues in the House of Representatives.  Abubakar Yunusa Ahmad told the press later that “unsafe food is linked to deaths of an estimated two million people annually including children. Food containing harmful bacteria, viruses, parasites or chemical substances is responsible for more than 200 diseases, ranging from diarrhea to cancer”. 
I therefore wish to make a passionate call through your medium to all concerned to support measures aimed at harnessing our proudly own staple and industrial raw materials, forest and vegetable resources, because they were proven to contain essential vitamins and natural supplements necessary for the healthy living of human beings and the animals, birds we use or eat. People generally believe that the very negligible investment of petroleum resources in agricultural undertakings made agri-business unattractive. All producers and processors deserted farms and factories such that we became not only incapable of feeding our teeming population but highly vulnerable to variety of health and security challenges.
We should avoid the fools’ mistakes of repeating same thing expecting to have different results. Instead, the billions of Naira collected through the Treasury Single Account (TSA) should be cautiously deployed to reinforce the interface between agricultural productivity and agro processing, packaging and marketing industries. That is by transforming the corridor and value chains through funding techniques and infrastructure, improving human capital, domestic and foreign marketing strategies. If the U.S. and the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) could bailout their ailing companies and distressed banks respectively, I believe sincerely that, we have stronger grounds to bailout our agriculture and agro processing ventures.  
Abdulkarim Abdullah Hussain, Kano, [email protected]