Healthy Diets and Reduced Land Pressure: Towards a Double Gain for Future Food Systems in Nigeria

Abstract

Nigeria is one of the most dynamic economies in Africa. Strong GDP and population growth coupled with urbanization trends place tremendous pressures on natural resources and the food systems that are dependent on them. Understanding the impact of these “mega trends” is important to identify key leverage points for navigating towards improved nutrition and food security in Nigeria. This paper contributes to the Foresight Project of the Food Systems for Healthier Diets which aims to analyse how the food system in Nigeria is expected to transform in the next decades, and to identify the leverage points for making sure that the transformation contributes to balanced consumer diets. For the food systems foresight, a well-established global economy-wide model, MAGNET, is applied that enables to capture the interlinkages among different food industry players in one consistent framework. By linking MAGNET to the GENUS nutritional database, it is further possible to relate the developments occurring on a macro-level with detailed macro and micronutrient consumption. Model projections suggest that a process of intensification of agriculture in combination with land substitution appears critical for the evolution of food and nutrition security, and for shifts towards healthy diets for the population. Intensification results in greater diversity of the production systems, which in turn cascades into positive effects on the diversity in the food supply and better food security outcomes.

The ‘Nigerian Diet’ and Its Evolution: Review of the Existing Literature and Household Survey Data

“…The general agreement in the literature has been that a traditional Nigerian diet was high in carbohydrates and fibre, low-to-moderate in fats, and relatively low in protein [1,2,[5][6][7][14][15][16][17][18][19]. The 2018 LSMS survey [12], which enquired from more than 5000 households across the country what foods they had consumed in the preceding week, suggested that Nigerian reliance on carbohydrates for calories has continued, even though it is slightly below the sub-Saharan African average of 71%, at about 69% of daily energy intake per capita [20].…”

“…Urban families in the dataset consumed almost all the food groups assessed more frequently, except for sweets and alcohol (Table 3). Urban consumption exceeded rural consumption particularly in animal-sourced foods (see also [18]) and vitamin A-rich fruits and vegetables. A more detailed look at the data reveals that the consumption of traditional or indigenous foods was higher in rural than in urban areas (Table A5).…”

Food systems for healthier diets in Nigeria: A research agenda

“…A further diversification of the food supply will have to coincide with a higher productivity of staple crops, in particular rice and maize (Smeets-Kristkova , Acterbosch , & Kuiper, 2019). In recent decades, agricultural output growth was mainly based on an expansion of the area under cultivation, adding to conflict over scarce grazing land and water -often at the expense of pastoral livestock farming.…”

Economic pathways to healthy, sustainable and culturally acceptable diets in Mexico

“…Economy-wide methods such as computable general equilibrium (CGE) models are well suited to assess the long-term impact of fiscal policies, because they capture all economic linkages and interactions between all sectors and institutions within the domestic economy and foreign trade (Ecker et al, 2012). These models have been used in the past to do foresight studies focused on food security (Brinkman et al, 2020;Doelman et al, 2019;van Meijl et al, 2020) and to assess the possibilities to transform country-level food systems to promote healthy diets (Kuiper and Cui, 2020;Latka et al, 2021;Smeets-Kristkova et al, 2019). Likewise, coupling CGE models with microsimulations is an approach that has been employed to assess food and nutrition outcomes (Breisinger and Ecker, 2014).…”