Uganda is set to celebrate world food day that is aimed at Heightening awareness on hunger, food security and promotion of yield enhancing technologies to increase productivity in agricultural sector.
According to Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) statistics, more than 1 billion people suffer from hunger as 36 million lose their lives. This means that one in every six people on Earth don’t get enough food to live a healthy life. Every five seconds a child under five years dies because of hunger, or of directly related causes.
The climax of activities will take place on October 6,at the Nabuin Zonal Agricultural Research and Development Institute in Karamoja sub-region. Under that theme ‘A Zero Hunger World by 2030 is Possible’, celebrations will focus on hunger, under nutrition, malnutrition and how these variables impact on development.
In the intervention to promote food and nutrition security, Ministry of agriculture has developed a number of policies which include the Food and Nutrition Policy (2003), the National Agricultural Policy (2013) and the National Action Plan for Nutrition (2015) and the National Agricultural Extension Policy (2015).
The Agriculture Sector Strategic Plan (2015/16-2019/20) which pushes for dietary diversification to ensure food security and promotes 15 priority commodity interventions for maize, bean, rice, cassava , banana, fruits (citrus, pineapples, mangoes), vegetables, coffee, tea, potato and dairy, beef, fisheries, poultry and apiary commodities products.
FAO indicates that Zero tolerance to hunger can help build a safer and prosperous world for everyone. FAO notes that, a dollar invested in hunger prevention could return between $15 and $139 in benefits and Zero hunger could save the lives of 3.1 million children a year.
“Ending child under nutrition could increase a developing country’s GDP by 16.5 percent and ending nutrition-related child mortality could increase a workforce by 9.4 percent,”