A joint report by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, United Nations Children’s Fund, and the World Food Programme, has revealed that about 12.1 million persons are expected to be in a food security crisis or worse situation
Kaduna State Lagos State, Federal Capital Territory, and 20 states in Nigeria till December this year
The October 2021 food security and nutrition analysis, known as the Cadre Harmonise, presented on Thursday, 12th November 2021 explained that the ongoing conflict in the North-East and the lingering economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic had continued to drive hunger in Nigeria.
The report stated that the analysis involved 154,008,198 people, out of whom 12,135,318 in the participating 20 states plus the FCT were currently experiencing crisis and emergency phases of food insecurity.
The report’s provisional results, which were released in Abuja, revealed that the number of people in critical or worse phases of food insecurity might increase to about 16.9 million unless efforts were made to scale up and sustain humanitarian support and other government interventions for livelihood recovery and resilience.
The report read in part, “Crisis level is described as a stage at which, even with humanitarian aid, at least one out of five households in
The target area is characterized by considerable food consumption deficits and acute malnutrition at high or higher rates than normal.
“It also stands for a situation in which households are marginally able to meet their minimum food needs by depleting assets related to livelihoods, leading to deficits in food consumption.”
The states analysed in the current Cadre Harmonise round include Abia, Adamawa, Bauchi, Benue, Borno, Cross River, Edo, Enugu, and Gombe.
Others include Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Lagos, Niger, Plateau, Sokoto, Taraba, Yobe, and the Federal Capital Territory.
The report stated that Borno Adamawa and Yobe were the most affected states.
The analysis estimated that in Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe states, which were affected by the prolonged armed conflict, 2.4 million people were currently in the crisis phase or worse and needed urgent assistance.
“These include an estimated 228,707 people in the emergence phase wherein, even with humanitarian aid, at least one out of five households is either facing extreme food deficits, resulting in a very high acute malnutrition or excessive mortality, or an extreme loss of assets relating to livelihoods, causing deficits in food consumption in the short term,” it stated.
It would be recalled that Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, during the 2021 second quarter meeting of Directors of the Department of State Services (DSS) in North-West states has predicted that the food crisis looms in Nigeria due to spate of insecurity across states.
He lamented that farmers cannot go to their farms, while some have fled their villages to avoid attacks by criminals.
