Cultivate more nutritional crops, expert tells Nigerians

A health communication consultant, Dr. Lawal Bakare, has called on Nigerian farmers to grow more nutritional crops that will address issues of malnutrition in line with the

Bakare, who made the call last week in Lokoja, said attention of most farmers were on production of tubers and cereals as cash crops instead of micro-nutrients producing crops.

The Consultant described nutrition as core and central to life as the physical and mental capacity of a people is dependent on the quality of their food intake, pointing out that the country as at today has nutrition problems.

He said that the nation was on yellow band on the international rating adding that though some countries were on the red band, the medium yellow band status was not the best place for the country in view of agricultural endowments.

Bakare, who noted that poverty and malnutrition work together,explained that “If an individual is malnourished at childhood, as he grows older, he becomes less productive tending to poverty.”

According to him, malnutrition affects women’s health and their capacity to deliver healthy babies with attendant high rate of maternal and infant mortality as well as low mental capacity among children.

The consultant said that the Federal Government had taken a deliberate policy to create the awareness and enlighten farmers on Nutrition-Sensitive Agriculture to encourage production and consumption of nutritional crops to improve the nutritional status of the nation.

He said it was in view of this that Synergos Nigeria, an international non-governmental organization, in a pilot undertaking, recently organized a two-day workshop for 35 actors from six Local Government Areas of the state.

Bakare said the workshop was designed to introduce the fundamentals of nutrition-sensitive agriculture and provide guidelines for action planning towards disseminating information on the concept in communities.