By Aaron Ossai
Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Tajuddeen Abbas has raised the alarm that no fewer than 35 million children under the age of five years are currently impacted by malnutrition.
Speaking at the inauguration of the House Committee on Nutrition and Food Security, the Speaker said that among the 35 million, 12 million are already stunted; three million are wasted while 23.5 million suffer from anemia.
According to him, an additional 17.7 million individuals are facing hunger, with 2.6 million children confronting severe acute malnutrition in 2024 adding that 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).
“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.
“Nigeria, 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 measures actions to tackle the menace of food insecurity and malnutrition affecting our people.
“According 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% children under the age of five stunted or chronically malnourished”, he said.
Speaking further, the Speaker revealed that the 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, he continued, 47.7 million Nigerians resort to crisis-level or above-crisis-level food-based coping strategies.
“The above data paints a very gloomy picture requiring urgent legislative action. This is particularly so given that some of the causative factors are issues within the legislative competence of the House 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 farmers 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”, he added.
