FENI seeks law to improve pupils’ nutrition

Group seeks law to improve pupils’ nutrition
12/12/2008
The Nation Newspaper

Dimeji Bankole Speaker, House of Representatives

Stories by Oluwakemi Dauda Business Correspondent
The Feed Nigeria Initiative (FENI), a non-governmental organisation (NGO), has sent a bill for a law to establish an agency to cater for the nutrition of school children to the House of Representatives.
FENI Project Coordinator Mr Adeola Soetan told reporters in Abeokuta, Ogun State, that the bill, dated October 24, was submitted through the House Committee on Agriculture.
Soetan said the bill is to identify with the Umaru Yar’Adua administration’s bid to make Nigeria food secure, achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in agriculture and reduce, by half, the poverty level and hunger by 2015.
Soetan explained that "if the bill is passed, the School Children Nutrition Agency will ensure optimum free nutrition per school day for pupils in public and government-assisted private schools."
He said the bill will:
• promote the right of more children, particularly, the vulnerable to adequate nutrition by reducing hunger among school children;
• boost school attendance to facilitate the objectives of the Universal Basic Education programme;
• attain optimum mental and physical development of pupils by consuming the recommended minimum protein intake per child per day through the school midday meal;
• increase and guarantee demand for agricultural produce such as cereals, eggs, fish, milk and meat to encourage commercial agriculture, agricultural processing and value addition to increase profitability of farmers;
• provide more skilled jobs as food vendors, cereals suppliers etc;
• build capacity for food processors and other stakeholders in the food chain for all food safety concepts such as Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP); and
• comply with the right to food policy enshrined in Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights, and 1996 Rome Declaration on World Food Security to which Nigeria is a signatory.
Soetan noted that
• Nigerian children are vulnerable to hunger.
His words: "The Nigerian child is hunger-vulnerable because of the dwindling family and household incomes occasioned by job losses, growing unemployment and adverse government policies. Most parents are incapable of feeding their children well and this result in malnutrition, disease prevalence and reduction in mental ability of children.
"This grinding poverty and inability to provide food for children has also resulted in a sharp drop in school enrolment. The intervention of government at different levels in providing adequate food to vulnerable groups like disadvantaged school pupils will alleviate the burden.
"It falls within the constitutional and social responsibilities of government. Governments must facilitate actions that will strengthen access to food; and when people are unable to realise the right to food for reasons beyond their control, governments must provide the means to do so. The bill is to make government more responsive to this responsibility."
Soetan cited comparative examples of some countries with sustained free nutrition for school pupils and constitutional framework to sell his idea.
• In Brazil, a school feeding programme provides meals to 37 million children as part of the county’s Zero Hunger programme initiated by President Luiz Lula da Silva. As of 2005, the programme had a budget of $46 billion. In India, the mandatory mid-day school meal programmme for all children in government and government-assisted primary schools is the largest school meal programme in the world serving more than free 50 million cooked meals daily,
• South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution of 1994 pledges in its bill of rights: "Everyone has the right to have access to sufficient food and water…" It specifies that the state has to provide for the right of every child to adequate nutrition.
"The precarious position of Nigeria as one of the food- insecure countries in the world makes this scheme imperative. The country can afford to feed her school children and in deed all children with good, nutritious and safe food free of charge.
"We passionately appeal to the national assembly to expedite action on this private initiated bill and also call on stakeholders in food enterprise and all people of good conscience to support the bill," he said.
Soetan concluded by promising that a national sensitisation campaign will commence soon for the realisation of this noble objective.