Oxfam International has called on the Federal Government to set up a consultative group to conduct joint assessment of the country’s food reserve systems.

Associate Country Director, Oxfam Nigeria, Mr. Tunde Ojei, told our correspondent last Thursday in Abuja that this would enable the country to forestall any form of food crisis.

Oxfam is a civil society group involved in the fight against global poverty and hunger.

“The advice for the government is that there should be a quick assessment of the current situation and not just look in Nigeria alone but look at what is going on in the neighbouring countries and look at how we can actually improve our food reserve systems.’’

According to him, the current food crisis being experienced in some countries in the Sahel region like Chad, Mauritania, Niger and Mali could spread to Nigeria.

He explained that food prices had more than doubled in those countries, adding that aids had not gone to the countries as they should be.

Ojei added that there were tendencies for those countries to look to their neighbours for food access.

He observed that Nigeria is one of the countries that Niger would turn to for food relief saying that this could have a negative impact on the former.

“We don’t have surplus of food; maybe we have just enough to take care of the current growing population.

“But if we then have other countries depending on us for food then there’ll be food crisis definitely because the limited food resources that we have would then be depended on by other countries as well.

“And that might have a negative impact on livelihood of so many people and of course access to food and affordability as well, because it will definitely raise the price of food in Nigeria.’’

Ojei advised government to address the issue of ageing small-holder farmers.

He said that a lot of young people were not interested in going into small-scale farming, and to make matters worse, they did not have access to modern technology.

He urged government to proactively look at how it could provide accessibility to modern technology tools and credit facilities to enable farmers to improve on their productivity.

Ojei added that Oxfam had begun an initiative called the ‘Grow Campaign’ which focused on making food available in abundance.

He said that the ‘Grow Campaign’ would address issues of food use, food productivity and food affordability.

He added that it would also create channels through which vulnerable communities would be able to have access to food at affordable price.

“It’s a global campaign. I say global because Oxfam works in a hundred countries and out of those countries there were specific countries that were selected as focus countries. Nigeria is one of the focus countries for ‘grow campaign’.

“We are sensitising people on what the campaign is about and we are using our local networks through the Association for Small Scale Agro-allied Producers in Nigeria and we are hoping that as a result of this we would actually promote more avenues for more people to get engaged in the campaign.’’