Global concern is rising over the growing number of hungry persons as nations celebrate World Food day today October 16.
“It is a day designed to raise awareness about all the starving people in the world and create solutions to end world hunger once and for all,” says Yahoo!News.com.
“World Food Day was proclaimed in 1979 by the Conference of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). It marks the date of the founding of FAO in 1945. The aim of the Day is to heighten public awareness of the world food problem and strengthen solidarity in the struggle against hunger, malnutrition and poverty. In 1980, the General Assembly endorsed observance of the Day in consideration of the fact that “food is a requisite for human survival and well-being and a fundamental human necessity,” says the United Nations.
The day is being marked at a time when the UN says one in eight people worldwide still suffers from chronic hunger.
UN organ, the Food and Agricultural Organisation, describes the figure as “unacceptable” and warns that the fight against hunger is slowing down.
“With almost 870 million people chronically undernourished in 2010-2012, the number of hungry people in the world remains unacceptably high,” FAO said in its 2012 report on food insecurity.
The latest figures show that 12.5 percent of the world’s population, or one person in every eight, has yet to be relieved of chronic hunger, it said.
To mark the day, Nigeria’s Minister of Agriculture, Dr. Akinwunmi Adesina, in a statement urged smallholder farmers to strengthen cooperatives to enable them to access funding and markets, the News Agency of Nigeria reports.
He said the Federal Government had recorded 3.9 million farmers on its database and had reached one million farmers directly with seeds and fertilisers.
Noting that this had ended 40 years of corruption in Nigeria’s agricultural sector, adding that farmers would get 10 million cell phones next year.
Five million of the phones will be given to women farmers to facilitate access to agricultural information.
He also dispelled fears that the flood disaster recorded in recent weeks in parts of the country would lead to food scarcity or famine.
Adesina gave the assurance that the Federal Government had mapped out strategies to address the challenge.
