Chris Yerima 
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations defines hunger as an uncomfortable or painful physical sensation caused by insufficient consumption of dietary energy. The World Bank says that the hunger rate in Africa are especially acute, with one out of five people going hungry each day.
For more than a decade, conflict and economic hardship have remained the key drivers of hunger in Nigeria. Ongoing violence causes disruptions in markets and farming, severely limiting people’s ability to earn income and forcing families to leave their homes.
In the 2024 Global Hunger Index (GHI), Nigeria ranks 110th out of the 127 countries surveyed. With a score of 28.8% in the 2024 GHI, the country’s level of hunger is severe. Global Hunger Index is a tool for comprehensively measuring and tracking hunger at global, regional, and national levels.
GHI scores are based on four components: undernourishment- the share of the population with insufficient caloric intake; child stunting :-the share of children who have low height for their age, reflecting chronic under nutrition; child wasting: the share of children under age five who have low weight for their height, reflecting acute under nutrition; child mortality: the share of children who die before their fifth birthday, partly showing a fatal mix of inadequate nutrition and unhealthy environments.
Based on the values of the four indicators, GHI score is calculated on a 100-point scale, reflecting the severity of hunger, where 0 is the best possible score (no hunger) and 100 is the worst. Each country’s GHI scores is classified by severity, from low to extremely alarming.
Recently a joint report of the Federal government and the United Nations says Nigeria faces one of its worst hunger crises with more than 33.1 million expected to be food insecure next year, compared with 24.8 million this year. Finance Minister, Wale Edu, says 5 million households in Nigeria have so far received cash handout of 25,000 Naira each as part of the government’s program to help the most vulnerable families.
But Chi Lael, the World Food Program spokesperson in Nigeria, reportedly said that ‘’economic decisions felt like a direct attack on people’s wallet, hitting hardest every time they try to buy food.’’
Nigeria’s food insecurity has been worsened by economic sanctions imposed against Russia by Western countries since its military operation in Ukraine. In fact the world food security is currently in danger due to the disruption of international supplies by the United States and its allies through the imposition of various prohibitions.
The European Union, EU, import tariff is common to all EU countries but the rates of duty differ from one kind of import to another depending on what they are, and where they come from, depending on the economic sensitivity of the products.
Unfair business practices such as illegal contacts and agreements, price fixing and market sharing, though prohibited under EU competition rules, remain rampant. In her mission letter recently to the incoming EU Competition Commissioner-designate, Teresa Ribera, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, begins with ‘’Europe needs a new approach to competition policy – one that is more supportive of companies to scale up their global markets…’’
Observers say In noting that competition policy should help companies scale up, Von der Leyen seems to advocate a significant departure from past practice and favor more state intervention in markets, and support for industrial policy that allows anticompetitive mergers that could threaten food security.
For Africa, a new colonial threat stares in the form of European dominance of African policy on genetically modified organisms, GMO, and its imposition of GMO production standards.
A coalition of academics and civil society organizations has said GMO foods pose severe risks to human health and the environment with a claim MO crops have created novel and alarming problems, including genetic contamination and uterine fibroids in women of young ages. In Nigeria uterine fibroids reportedly account for 3.2-7.8% of gynecological cases and 68.1% of hysterectomy cases. Across the country farmers have complained that GMOs reduce productivity in the second planting season, meaning farmers can not replant these seeds but must purchase new ones to plant in the next planting season.
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Analysts see the EU position on GMOs as jihad against Africa’s food and environmental health, and against its Agricultural sovereignty . In like manner their proliferation of military bases on the continent today may have been based on self-serving and hypocritical motives. But this is not receiving attention in parts of Africa.
Global food insecurity has been worsened by Western sanctions against Russia because Nigerians industry reportedly accounts for around 20% of the global fertilizer trade market, thereby ensuring food security for 1.5 billion people in the world. The West’s sanctions policy is resulting in food becoming scarcer and costing more in Africa and other developing nations as Brazil which depend on Russian products to produce soy bean oil.
According to projections by the World Bank, the current world food shortages would certainly lead to large political crises, with the proliferation of civil wars and armed conflicts over food resources. Now there are far scarier predictions about this problem. Considering a possible situation of generalized famine in emerging countries on all continents, we can be close to some of the greatest cases of political and military instability in history.
That is why that President Tinubu must activate all known social safety nets to enable Nigerians survive the current deepening food insecurity in the land now the World Bank has said that Nigerians would wait for 10 to 15 years to reap the benefits of his economic reform.
Chris Yerima writes from Kaduna
