The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is focusing its support for Mozambique on resilience to climate change and on long term social protection in order to meet the target of “Zero Hunger” by 2030, the WFP natonal director for Mozambique, Karine Manente, told a Maputo press conference on Monday.
She said the WFP is helping the government draw up policies to confront problems of food and nutritional insecurity.
“The plan intends to ensure that people hav access to nutritional foodstuffs and held them become more resilient to the climate shocks to which Mozambique is ever more prone”, she added.
Speaking at the same press confernece, held to mark World Food Day, the representative in Mozambique of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Castro Camarada, said that at least 24 per cent of the Mozambican population – or about 6.5 million people – are still in a situation of food insecurity.
Manente was optimistic that Mozambique is well placed to read the “Zero Hunger” goal by 2030. She claimed that Mozambique had met the first of the Millennoum Development Goals (MDGs) which was to cut by half the number of people suffering from hunger between 1990 and 2015.
“It was about 56 per cent, and now it’s 24 per cent”, she said. “There’s an improvement. And with the investment policies that exist, the prospect is that Mozambique can reach zero by 2030. That’s the great effort the country is making with the support of the United Nations and other partners”.
Camarada urged that actions be directed towards young people in the countryside so that they would become interested in agricultural and livestock activities, including agro-business including marketing and small scale processing.
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Source: AIM
