By Neo Kolane
The United Nations has invested heavily in resilience-building programmes and committed to providing more than M161-billion over the next five years to address food security and nutrition needs worldwide – including Africa and Lesotho.
During a virtual press briefing convened by the Africa Regional Media Hub on the Ukraine war’s impact on food insecurity in Africa this week, it emerged that food security is not a soft security issue, but a central one which provides as a link among all other great global challenges.
It emerged during the briefing that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought that into very sharp focus. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has triggered a far-reaching humanitarian crisis, it was commented.
It was at this occasion where the assistant to the administrator in the bureau for resilience and food security to the U.S Agency for international development, Dr Jim Barnhart said Putin’s ‘unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine not only threatens the lives of Ukrainians, but is already having substantial impact on the global food supply’.
Barnhart said with Russia and Ukraine as major suppliers of the world’s exports and agriculture inputs such as fertilizers, the effects of Putin ’s war will reverberate for years to come.
“Before Russia invaded Ukraine, the food security context was already concerning due to the lasting Covid-19 impacts, ongoing humanitarian emergencies, high global food prices and high fertilizer prices.
“If not mitigated, these price increases could result in significant increases in global poverty, hunger and malnutrition, particularly in regions like Sub-Saharan Africa,” he said.
Barnhart said America is trying to ensure that this crisis does not force countries to close their borders and start restricting trade in commodities such as fertilizer.
“In trying to work with SADC and the African Union and other countries to ensure that we keep the borders open and we keep fertilizers and seed moving across the African continent as the market demand is one way to help mitigate and make it less likely that we move into crisis.
“We are still collecting data, both at the country level and at a regional and global level and trying to track on where we see the most sensitive potential areas globally,” he said.
The permanent representative of the U.S. mission to the UN agencies in Rome, Ambassador Cindy McCain said in the short term, Africa is embarking on crop production in regional and local small farms.
“The governments of the continent, like the rest of the world, do their best not to close themselves off. They should stay open to trade, allow markets to operate. If needed to reallocate resources to ensure that the most vulnerable are getting nutrition support required and other kinds of basic staples to allow them to get through this period,” McCain said.
