By Michael Olugbode
The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations on Friday stressed the need to immediately scale up its intervention in four Lake Chad Basin countries of Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon to address the case of 3 million food insecure people due largely to the Boko Haram crisis.
The organisation which lamented that its budget of US$ 232 million in the next three years (2017-2019) was largely not met by financiers, said in Nigeria alone US$ 191 million was required to save 2.5 million people the Boko Haram crisis had made food insecure.
The Director General of FAO, Prof. Jose da Silva, who was in Maiduguri at the organisation’s financed farms for internally displaced persons (IDPs) where he was asked for further assistance by farmers, later at a press conference said the organisation was in dire need of finance in order to immediately arrest poverty and starvation in the Lake Chad Basin.
He said that the targeted beneficiaries in Cameroon was 200,000 at a cost of US$ 13.8 million in the next three years with Niger needing US$ 11 million to cater for 155,000 with Chad have 120,000 people and financial need of US$ 12.5 million.
Silva who arrived in Maiduguri on Friday after an earlier visit to Ndjamena, the capital of Chad, said to curb the crisis in the Lake Chad Basin, four strategic framework needed to be employed; “food production is enhanced and the nutrition gap is reduced; opportunities for income, jobs and livelihood diversification are improved; sustainable peace, natural resource management and resource-based conflict reduction including at a cross-border level are promoted; and food security analysis, coordination and information management are ensured”.
He lamented that the Lake Chad Basin was grappling with a complex humanitarian emergency across northeastern Nigeria, Cameroon’s Far North, western Chad and southeastern Niger.
He said that: “In the most affected areas of these four countries, conflict and displacements are adding to other structural factors that are undermining the livelihoods of the population, increasing food insecurity and poverty, diminishing the access to basic and social services (water, sanitation, health and education).”
Silva who presented the Lake Chad Basin crisis response strategy (2017-2019) at the press conference, said Lake Chad Basin crisis was currently one of the largest humanitarian crisis in the world with 11 million people in need of assistance, 7.1 million food insecure people, 515,000 children suffering from severe acute malnutrition.
He also said the under-five mortality rates in IDP locations four times the emergency threshold, 2.3 million displaced people (second largest displacement in the world), 75.7% of IDPs were staying with host communities, increasing their vulnerability and a million returnees.
Borno State Governor, Alhaji Kashim Shettima. who hosted the FAO DG, said there was need to urgently address the crisis in the Lake Chad Basin before it boomerang out of hand.
Shettima who lamented that the area was perhaps the poorest and unattended to region in the world, warned that should nothing be done to address its deprivation, Europe should be prepared for over 30 million refugees from Nigeria.
He asked: “Would Europe cope with over 30 million English speaking refugees from Nigeria if the crisis is allowed to snowball?
The Nigerian minister of agriculture, Audu Ogbeh who was also in Maiduguri to welcome the FAO DG, said the only way to solve many problems in Africa was by investing in agriculture and drive poverty away from the continent.
