Government at all levels, ministry of health and the state and federal levels, policy makers, public health advocates and all Nigerians should brace up for the task of reducing the burden of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) responsible for over 41 million deaths or 71 percent of global mortality every year.
This should be achieved through healthier diets and drastic reduction in the consumption of foods containing excess sugar, salt and trans-fats as being promoted, distributed and sold by the Big Food and Beverage industry in their scramble for a fair share of Nigeria’s food market.
Public health advocates made the submissions in Lagos at a training programme organized for pro-health crusaders, activists and journalists by the Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA) with support from the Global Health Advocacy Incubator (GHAI) and Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF).
In his welcome address during the training with the theme: Human Rights, Food Justice and SSB Tax Movement, Executive Director of CAPPA, Akinbode Oluwafemi, said the goal of the training is to “build capacity and strengthen our collective resolve as pro-people advocates to further defend the fundamental rights of Nigerians to consume healthy foods.
“It is also aimed at protecting the people from corporations promoting unhealthy diets, such as excessive consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, sodium and trans-fat, among others. Access to nutritious and affordable food is a prerequisite for a healthy living.”
Lamenting that NCDs have caught the attention of the global health community as they are responsible for about 41 million or 71 percent of global deaths yearly, he said in Nigeria, 30 percent of annual deaths result from NCDs such as diabetes, hypertension, coronary heart diseases, stroke, cancer and oral health diseases, among others.
“Therefore, to mitigate NCDs, the consumption of these beverages and unhealthy diets ought to be reduced… In this vein, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends the effective taxation of sugar-sweetened beverages as part of its global action plan for the prevention and control of NCDs.
“Across the world, taxes on SSBs have not only been proven to drive behavioral changes that improve public health, but have also been confirmed to generate revenues that can be used to enhance pubic infrastructure and offset healthcare costs associated with NCDs,” he stated.
In deepening the conversations around food justice and human rights, Director of HOMEF, Dr. Nnimmo Bassey, who gave the keynote address on Healthy Food is Human Right, maintained that the regulation of food system in Nigeria is very faulty and required a complete repeal or drastic review to address the inherent flaws in the regulations document.
In his presentation titled: Biosafety and the Right to Safe Food, he described food sovereignty as the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.
Bassey particularly deplored promoters of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) crops and foods, maintaining that such crops, which are engineered to tolerate herbicides, survive direct application of herbicides that would kill conventional crops, simplify weed control, saves labour, adding that the development is becoming compounded by gene drives being promoted in some African countries.
He explained that gene drives is a method of ensuring that a higher proportion of an organism’s offspring inherit a certain ‘selfish’ gene in a way that would happen by chance and in this way allows a mutation or foreign gene to spread quickly through an entire population.
“Gene drives is a way of making changes to an entire population of a specific species by changing or altering its genetic material (its genome). They have the potential to dramatically transform our natural world and even humanity’s relationship to it.
“The invention of the CRISPRCAS9 and its application to Gene Drives (also known as a “mutagenic chain reaction”) gives technicians the ability to intervene in evolution, to engineer the fate of an entire species, to dramatically modify ecosystems and to unleash large-scale environmental changes, in ways never thought possible before. The assumption of such power is a moral and ethical threshold that must not be crossed without great restraint,” he stated.
Citing Goal 2 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), he pointed out that it focuses on ending hunger, achieving food security and improving nutrition and promoting sustainable agriculture, adding: “It aims to end hunger by 2030 and ensure access by all people, in particular the poor and people in vulnerable situations, including infants, to safe, nutritious and sufficient food all year round.”
Among other goals, it aims to double the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers, in particular women, indigenous peoples, family farmers, pastoralists and fishers, including through secure and equal access to land, other productive resources and inputs, knowledge, financial services, markets and opportunities for value addition and non-farm employment by 2030.
Also in his presentation titled: SSBs and Nigeria’s NCDs Burden, a public health specialist at the University College Hospital, University of Ibadan, Dr. Francis Fagbule, said evidence has shown a growing burden of NCDs in Nigeria.
He revealed that such NCDs include cardiovascular disease, coronary artery disease, congenital heart disease, congestive heart failure, peripheral arterial disease, pulmonary embolism, as well as common risk factors like hypertension and obesity caused by SSBs, excessive sodium and trans-fat.
Others are prevalence of diabetes, cancer and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) in Africa with 20 million casualties in year 2000 and 26.3 million in 2010, an increase of 31.5 percent in a decade and high prevalence of obesity reaching 21 million or 20.3 percent in 2020 and 12 million or 11.6 percent with a higher percentage among women.
“In 2016, NCDs were estimated to account for between 24 percent and 29 percent of deaths in Nigeria. NCDs account for 24 percent of total deaths, cardiovascular diseases took the lead of 11 percent (over seven percent) of deaths attributable to NCDs, cancers (three percent), diabetes (two percent) and chronic respiratory diseases (one percent),” he stated.
“On the economic burden of NCDs, he said the median out-of-pocket cost of NCDs was between ₦10,193 and ₦10,750 monthly, estimates of which showed that about 30 percent of households with NCDs experienced catastrophic health expenditures in 2018.
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“Nigeria’s National Health Accounts show that ₦384.4 billion was spent on NCDs in Nigeria in 2017 with direct costs, medical expenses for patients and indirect costs, loss of productive time for government and relatives of patients,” he added.
On his part, Akinbode, who spoke on Unhealthy Diet: Industry Manipulation or Free Choice?, stressed that there is a big food scramble for Nigeria by the food and beverages industry, adding that Nigerian must strive to know what they are consuming and the source of the food at all times.
He said Nigeria with a population of 218 million is the largest country in Africa, the fourth largest consumer of SSBs with 42.54 percent at an average of 14 years and that effective food policies are either non-existent, at the formative stage or sometimes weak and at best, poorly implemented.
Akinbode expressed concern that Nigeria is constantly on the downward trend toward fast food culture and ultra-processed foods with excess sugar, sodium (or salt), trans-fats and GMOs, stressing that increasing disposable income, urban culture and lifestyle, Big Food deceptive marketing and changing diet patterns were responsible for the slide.
He urged Nigerians to be wary of industry manipulation, insisting that the industry engages in deceptive marketing; interference in policy formulation; marketing to kids; media attacks; underhand marketing practices and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programmes that promote false research.
Others are deployment of proxies and agents; deployment of digital media and digital media influencers; influence peddling; support to government agencies; funding false pro-health NGOs, adding: “Promoters of the food and beverage industry are big and influential.”
