The Country Manager of HarvestPlus in Nigeria, Mr Paul Ilona has revealed that Nigeria loses over 1.5billion(dollars)annually due to lack of biofortified food, disabilities and Science, adding that unless we eat the right food there will be a problem of growing full capacity.
At the press conference which held at International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) Ibadan on Tuesday, HarvestPlus country manager, Paul Ilona stated in his address that the key message they have for Nigerians is that “Nigerians are what they eat.”
Mr Ilona said “The food we eat becomes our future. Statistics have shown that every hour we lose 100 children and six women of child bearing age in Nigeria. These figures are alarming as giant of Africa as the issue of malnutrition is a great challenge in the nation.”
Ilona applauded the Nigerian government on their tremendous effort in order to add value to life through improvement in our food culture by mandating every food company to fortify their food.
“HarvestPlus is trying to address the need of majority Nigerians, although majority of these Nigerians are low income earner; about 60% Nigerians earn less than a dollar a day. The question then is to what extent can they purchase the nutritious food?” he queried.
However, he said, “if this large population remains in the rural areas and they are farmers, the only thing we can do to add value to their lives is to make the crops they grow become the channel to produce nutritious food.
“HarvestPlus is not ready to take steps that will be truncated mid way. So right from the onset, we knew clearly that intervention in nutrition must be well plated in the value chain that will have an income orientation, therefore there is need to drive in the demand and supply for these nutritious food.”
“Today in Nigeria we have thousands of investors in the nutritious food sector cutting across seed production-production reservation-value addition –distribution,” he said.
Ilona further spoke on the biofortified restaurant as one of the HarvestPlus marketing because the whole work of biofortified crops must end on the table before we can get the desired impact.
In getting biofortified food on the table, there are two point of sale which are open market and online point of sale (where you can order your biofortified food on line and they are being supply to you where you are.
Hence, unemployment to Nigerian youth of today is already above 20% mark and this is a time bomb for this country unless it is probably address.
HarvestPlus can be seen as a job creator for Nigerian youth because it sees a very big opportunity of reaching out to youth for them to pick up opportunities in biofortified crops.
The Country Manager concluded by thanking the Nigeria Government for its financial and moral support. He added that Nigeria will grow its GDP only when we get to a point in which Nigerians go to the market for a more nutritious food.