Why stakeholders commit to promoting compliance in food fortification 

As part of efforts to identify challenges, opportunities and make holistic recommendations to promote compliance on food fortification and workforce nutrition in Nigeria, stakeholders in the food industry met during the week in Lagos.

The meeting, themed, ‘Fortifying Nigeria’s Future: Interface Session with Stakeholders (State and Non-state actors) Towards Promoting Fortification Compliance and Workforce Nutrition,’ was at the instance of the Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC), National Economic Summit Group (NESG) and E-Health.

The Executive Director, CISLAC, Auwal Ibrahim Musa (Rafsanjani), in his welcome address reeled out statistics around malnutrition and its negative impact.
Quoting the National Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS) 2022, he said 44.1 per cent of children under the age of 5 in Nigeria are stunted.

According to Musa, the importance of workforce nutrition in Nigeria cannot be overstated. Although working class individuals spend one third of the day within the work environment (an average of 8 hrs), he stated that a good percentage of workers do not eat healthy within this time for reasons such as availability and affordability.

“This has a significant impact on productivity, as malnourished workers are more likely to be sick, tired, have industrial accidents, and be absent from work, thereby leading to lost man hour.
“These facts have devastating impact on health, productivity, and economic development. Nigeria loses an estimated $1.5 billion in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) annually due to diminished productivity and increased health care costs caused by malnutrition (UNICEF, 2009).”

Musa explained that food fortification is the process of adding essential vitamins and minerals to food vehicles to improve their nutritional content.
“This is an important public health intervention that can help to prevent malnutrition, which is a major problem in many countries, including Nigeria.”

He noted that the government of Nigeria developed regulations and mandatory food fortification policies in 2009 and 2019 respectively to promote food fortification being implemented by three key agencies – National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) and Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON).

“It is worthy to not that since the existence of the policy document, these agencies have been working within their mandates to implement the policy, and monitor compliance, with some measure of progress recorded.
“However, there is still a need to improve compliance so that every Nigerian irrespective of social status understands the importance of fortified foods, and is able to afford it.”

Though he observed that there are a number of challenges to be overcome in ensuring food fortification compliance in Nigeria, Musa was optimistic that they are surmountable.
He underscored raising awareness on the importance of food fortification as a way to generate demand for fortified food products.

“Second, we need to strengthen the enforcement of food fortification regulations. The food regulatory and oversight agencies need to be given the resources and authority they need to enforce the regulations. We also need to create a system for monitoring compliance with the regulations.
“Third, we need to provide incentives for businesses to comply with the regulations, looking at business scale, and alternative financing for premixes. Businesses need to be convinced that it is in their best interest to fortify their foods. We can do this by providing tax breaks or other financial incentives.

“Fourth, all stakeholders need to key into the common Digital QA/QC systems that can be used to monitor food production and distribution in real time. This can help to identify potential problems early, and to take corrective action before they lead to non-compliance. The system can be used to analyse data, identify trends and patterns.
“This information can be used to improve food safety practices and to prevent problems from happening in the first place. The system can be used to monitor food production, packaging and distribution remotely. This addresses the problem of poor resources or where it is difficult to get inspectors to the facilities on a regular basis.”

Musa implored food regulators to work together in a number of ways to improve monitoring of food fortification by large-scale producers in Nigeria.
In his goodwill message, the Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group, Mr. ‘Laoye Jaiyeola, noted that the global decline in nutritional indices and its adverse effects on human capital development and productivity have been of great concern, especially as malnutrition and hunger continue to rise, despite efforts to curtail it.

According to Jaiyeola, who was represented by Olayinka Iyinokakan, the global health crisis of COVID-19 further exposed the economic vulnerability of African countries and the weaknesses of the health and food systems.

“Despite these challenges, the Federal Government has committed to food and nutrition security, which has led to remarkable improvements in agricultural production and productivity with significant efforts from private sectors, international and national non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil society organisations, research institutes, and development agencies.
“However, the remarkable agricultural production and productivity improvement has yet to translate into improved nutrition and healthy diets among consumers as more people suffer from malnutrition.

According to the 2019 UNICEF report, an estimated two million children in Nigeria suffer from severe acute malnutrition, and seven per cent of women of childbearing age also suffer from acute malnutrition.

Jaiyeola tasked stakeholders to strengthen the policy and institutional frameworks for implementing Food Nutrition Security programmes and promote food fortification compliance and workforce nutrition.

“One important step required to reduce malnutrition sustainably is the upscaling of nutrition-sensitive policies and programmes,” he noted.

The Chairman, House of Representatives’ Committee on Health Institutions, Amos Magaji, highlighting the importance of food fortification stated that if Nigerians feed well, they will not be sick and will not visit the hospitals.

He, however, said that aside from ensuring adequate fortification, there is need to look at issues of storage and transportation of food to ensure safe food consumption.
The Director, Micro-nutrient Deficiency Control, Federal Ministry of Health, Mr. John Uruakpa, said that food fortification is one of the cost effective means of improving food content for proper development of Nigerians.

Uruakpa observed that it is over 20 years that Nigeria has been involved in food fortification but rather than talking about improving the giant strides recorded in terms of food fortification implementation, the talk now is about ensuring compliance.

The Country Director, Global Alliance For Improved Nutrition (GAIN), Dr. Michael Ojo, said his organisation was founded 21 years ago, with the aim of tackling human suffering caused by malnutrition, and it has worked through its programmes to deliver impact on the ground in many countries across the world.

“We have inspired wider national and global action by influencing government policies with evidence and learning from practice. We have catalysed alliances and facilitated public and private sector engagements and investments in the transformation of food systems so that they deliver healthier diets, especially for the most vulnerable.

“GAIN has evolved its work in Nigeria over the years. We started life in Nigeria firmly focussed on Large-scale Food Fortification (LSFF) – a proven, cost-effective, and scalable intervention to deliver essential nutrients to people through commonly consumed staples and condiments.

“However, as our understanding of the drivers of malnutrition evolved, we have engaged more and more with tackling the root cause of all forms of malnutrition – diets (or unhealthy diets) – by focussing on food systems and how they can be transformed.

“In spite of that evolution, LSFF still remains a significant part of our work in Nigeria. We have a comprehensive and mature national food fortification programme that is subscribed to by the private sector, largely understood by the population, with established regulatory structures and oversight with SON, NAFDAC and FCCPC.”

“But there is a gap. The programme is not as effective as we would expect to be in delivering micronutrients to vulnerable population. The good thing about LSFF if done properly is that people don’t even need to think about whether the food is fortified. These are foods that people commonly consume (wheat, maize, oil, salt, sugar, etc). If all food is fortified as they should, the system simply delivers the micronutrients!

“We have done fantastically well with iodine deficiency. But we know that deficiencies of vitamin A, B-vitamins, zinc and iron remain at alarming levels in some of the critical populations – children under 5, adolescents and Women of Reproductive Age (WRA).”

Ojo however argued that one of the reasons for the gap is the variable and in many cases low levels of compliance with fortification standards.

“We have a few beacon companies performing extremely well. There are many others however who are not complying, and by so doing, securing undue advantage over those that comply but more importantly shortchanging Nigerians by delivering supposedly fortified foods without the fortification or at lower levels than required.

“Another reason is that regulatory oversight is not as rigorous as it should be, just as there are unnecessary overlaps in responsibilities, which places undue burdens on business and reduces the overall effectiveness of regulation.”

The meeting had some technical sessions with presentations by NAFDAC, SON, FCCPC and E-Health Africa.
The plenary discussion on the opportunities for increasing compliance and creating enabling environment for producers was facilitated by Senator Ibrahim Yahaya Oloriegbe.