News:
October 27, 2020
Speaker of the Community Parliament Rt. Honorable Sidie Mohamed Tunis whiles serving as chair of a high-level regional meeting in West and Central Africa parliamentarians on mobilizing parliamentarians and keeping nutrition as a priority during the corona pandemic, urged the lawmakers to prioritize advocacy on the protection of the right to food.
According to him the meeting was very timely as early indications coming from research shows that the corona pandemic is likely to affect food security and nutrition as movements of farmers are being restricted thus disrupting the chain of production, processing and food supply.
The Speaker further urged lawmakers to be seen vigorously working with their respective governments and non-governmental organisation and the UN agencies so as to ensure quality food intake is maximized during the global pandemic.
As a way of highlighting what the MPs have done so far to achieve the threshold of food sufficiency in the West African region during the pandemic period, he revealed that in his home country Sierra Leone, they have established parliamentary alliance on food security and nutrition through workshops and capacity building.
For that lawmakers are now in better position to envisage likely impact of the corona pandemic on food security and nutrition in their countries and possible areas of policy and legal reforms.
Meanwhile, Dr Namoudou Keita, a representative of the West African Health Organisation (WHO) noted that as at Sunday, October 25, 2020 there was ninety-two-point seven percent recovery rate of the COVID-19 cases in the sub-region.
He added that out of the 187,483 confirmed cases in the region ECOWAS has 173,818 recoveries with 2,739 deaths.
Kwaku Sakyi-Danso/Ghanamps.com