By Kayode Araba
Thus, speaker Abbas said this Committee is very crucial to the vision of the House to be
responsive, results-oriented and effective in performing its constitutional mandate towards the security and welfare of
Nigerians. and like the rest of the world, is experiencing a food crisis, exacerbated by climate change, rising inflation and
pervasive insecurity. Hence, the decision of the House to set up a Committee that would be dedicated to fashioning legislative
and measures, actions to tackle the menace of food insecurity and malnutrition affecting our people.
However, he said accounting to the UN Office for the Coordination of humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) about 26.5 million Nigerians would be grappling with high levels of food insecurity in 2024 while the country is said to have the second highest burden of malnutrition in the world, with 32% of children under the age of
five stunted or chronically mainourished. Malnutrition currently impacts 35 million children under the age of five, among whom 12 million are stunted, 3 million are wasted, and 23.5 million suffer from anemia. An additional 17.7 million individuals are facing hunger, with 2.6 million children confronting severe acute malnutrition in 2024. Among women of childbearing age, 7% experience severe acute malnutrition. These figures may
exacerbate due to the current food inflation rate, which stands at about 33.7% (according to the Central Bank of Nigeria).
Furthermore, speaker Abbas said World Food Programme’s September 2023 publication of the ‘Nigeria Hunger Map’ estimates that 24.9 million Nigerians are in an acute or critical stage of hunger, categorized as an emergency, while 85.8 million Nigerians have insufficient food consumption. Among this population, 47.7 million Nigerians resort to crisis-level or above-crisis-level food-
based coping strategies
.Therefore , speaker Abbas also said that tha above data paints a very gloomy urgent
legislative action. This is particularly so given that some of the causative factors are issues within the legislative competence
of the House representative to deal with. The food and nutrition crisis affecting
us as a nation is partly caused by global warming and climate change, pervasive insecurity across the country which prevents
famer and herders from engaging in their various agricultural activities, poor Irrigation, outdated land tenure system, crude and traditional farm practices on subsistence levels as well as a myriad of other challenges.
