Dr Sifau A. Adejumo on ‘Gender and Food Security: The Roles of Agricultural Scientists’
This month’s WORDOC-IFRA seminar, held on February 20 2018 at Lady Bank-Anthony Hall, featured Dr Sifau A. Adejumo of the Department of Crop Protection and Environmental Biology, University of Ibadan. She spoke on the topic ‘Gender and Food Security: The Roles of Agricultural Scientists’. Dr Adejumo elucidated this topic by looking at such issues as ‘food and nutrition security’, ‘the state of food and nutrition security in Nigeria’, ‘causes of food insecurity’, ‘gender relations of food security’, ‘ways of enhancing food security’, and the ‘roles of agriculturists’ in the project of achieving food security in Nigeria and Africa at large.
This WORDOC-IFRA seminar was well-attended by participants from beyond the walls of the University, and it created an avenue for town and gown to consider issues that relate to the translation of research efforts in academia into outcomes that directly impact on the lives and experiences of people in the general society. Dr Adejumo, in the spirit of liberating the conversation between academics and laypeople, gave much of her lecture in the Yoruba language in order to make herself understood to the many women and men who had come from communities environing the University of Ibadan. This choice of language made for ready interaction between the scientist and her audience, as witnessed in the Q&A session where common grounds were established between research problems and the challenges of everyday life for women in Nigerian society in the context of food production and distribution.
The presenter and audience focused their exchange on the problems of ‘severe hunger’ and ‘hidden hunger’ and on the means for tackling these challenges in their diverse dimensions. Gender imbalance was dissected as one of the factors that militate against the achievement of food and nutritional security, and Dr Adejumo expounded on how this factor features at all stages of the food production chain ‘from farm to plate’. She highlighted the importance of women-based knowledge in efforts to realize food and nutritional security in poorer households.
Dr Adejumo utilized the seminar to disseminate information on some of the emerging findings and practices in advanced agricultural science that specifically address the issue of food and nutritional insecurity in developing economies.