The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is collaborating with the Nigerian government to provide flood anticipation and mitigation tools to boost security.

Koffy Kouacou, the FAO country representative to Nigeria and ECOWAS, spoke with journalists at the Anticipatory Action for Flood Risk in the Sahel Workshop on Wednesday in Abuja.

He said at least 52 million people in the region were food insecure.

“It is a regional workshop for learning and identification of best practices, challenges and way forward to scale up anticipatory action for floods in the Sahel and supported by German government and other partners,’’ said Mr Kouacou.

He said one of the major factors driving food insecurity in the Sahel Region was climate change, which results in flooding.

The FAO official added, “So, how we can better anticipate how to allow our farmers to better cultivate and boost the production in the country? That is one of the key purposes of the regional workshop.

“It is better for all of us to discuss how we can better anticipate how to help the farmers boost their production and grow their yield.

“We are facing a very serious security situation in our region; for example, in 2020, we had around seven million people in our region affected by the flood. FAO did studies in six countries; we have 2.4 million hectares of land destroyed by flood.’’

Mr Kouacou said that in 2020, only in Nigeria, floods destroyed farmland and crops capable of feeding 5 million people.

Luca Parodi, regional specialist for FAO working on Anticipatory Action and Emergency Response, said the workshop brought together many actors, regional partners, the government, and other UN agencies to discuss how they could better manage flood risk.

Mr Parodi said the workshop also allowed the sharing of information on how stakeholders could collectively improve on early warning and surveillance risk and the information to the communities.

Mr Parodi said there was a need for early warning and funding to implement it. 

(NAN)