Chronicle Editor
Leonard Ncube in Victoria Falls
THE Food and Nutrition Council (FNC) met last week in Victoria Falls to strategise on how the country can enhance sustainable food security and eradicate poverty.
FNC was established in 2000 as the lead agency under the Office of the President and Cabinet, with the core task of co-ordinating, analysing, and promoting a cohesive multi-stakeholder national response to food and nutrition insecurity in the country.
FNC chairs the Zimbabwe Vulnerability Assessment Committee (ZimVAC) Rural Livelihoods Assessment (RLA) committee and some of its responsibilities include carrying out assessments, research, monitoring and evaluation.
Speaking on the sidelines of the FNC biannual meeting, FNC director general, Dr George Kembo said the country is coming out of Covid-19 and facing climate change-related challenges that affect people’s livelihoods and income options.
Such challenges, he said, affect rural communities hence the need for continuous monitoring of the food and nutrition situation, which is one of the priority areas of the National Development Strategy 1:2021-2025 (NDS1).
“This is a review meeting as we take stock of how we are implementing our Food and Nutrition Council commitments in line with the national development plan and also to what extent we are feeding into the Office of the President and Cabinet programmes.
“The purpose of this management and board meeting is to ensure that we implement activities on time and we are concentrating on improving people’s lives and high impact interventions that we are implementing to address people’s livelihoods,” said Dr Kembo.
He said Zimbabwe generally relies on rain-fed agriculture which influences production and food security thereby causing climate shocks.
Dr Kembo commended the Government for coming up with safety nets like Intwasa conservation farming programme to build resilience, enhance food secure households and income, as well as for mobilising and storing surplus food for onward distribution to the most vulnerable to protect livelihoods.
“So a number of issues are coming out of the discussions so far and one of them is to recognise that as a country we are subjected and exposed to a number of shocks.
“What we are doing is to come up with strategies that can inform policy decision making to enhance our agriculture intervention, improve our food security towards ensuring that no one is left behind in terms of food distribution and strategies to ensure that we connect with the citizenry,” said Dr Kembo.
He said there is a need to establish to what extent relevant research and innovations can be implemented to address malnutrition using locally available options.
This also extends to understanding the micro nutrients composition of local foods and to what extent the country can undertake the necessary laboratory research to identify high impact foods to improve people’s nutrition status.
“We are mandated to ground-truth the situation on the ground, collecting data and information in terms of how people are earning a living in rural and urban areas and produce a report so that we address food and nutrition and any forms of hunger.
“That is why we have the vulnerability assessment and we are glad the safety nets Government is implementing are a combination of food safety and these best programmes are in the right step,” he said.
FNC board chair Dr Ngaite Nkomo Mgeni said there are plans to have quarterly, annual and biannual reviews.
She said addressing food and nutrition insecurities is key to attainment of an upper middle income society.
“Our presence here is to review FNC’s performance against the set targets as advocated in the Government of Zimbabwe public Entities and Corporate Governance Act.
“FNC is the coordinator and convener of food issues in the country and this is critical tool for the Government and development partners to use the strategic plan as an instrument to identify critical areas of collaboration as we leverage our competitive advantage with a focus of realising our vision that every Zimbabwean is free from hunger and all forms of lack of nutrition.
“We want to make sure we see a progressive, hunger-free, malnutrition-free Zimbabwe from children up to adults working with our stakeholders and shareholders,” she said.
Poverty continues to be one of the major underlying causes of vulnerability to food and nutrition insecurity as well as precarious livelihoods in Zimbabwe and this has been compounded by Covid-19.
According to the latest ZimVAC report, Government objective is to increase food self-sufficiency from the current 45 percent to 100 percent and reduce food insecurity from the 59 percent recorded in 2019 to less than 10 percent by 2025. — @ncubeleon
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