HIVOS regional advocacy manager for sustainable foods William Chilufya has called on politicians to come up with clear plans on how they will handle the food crisis as the country gets into an election year.

Speaking during the launch of the Chongwe Food System Lab, Thursday, Chilufya said that political players needed to come on board and speak on issues of food.

“As we commemorate World Food Day for 2020, it’s very important that we all invest our time and efforts in ensuring that we are promoting healthy foods and for the first time, we would like to see our political players come on board to speak to issues to do with food, how we produce the food and how healthy the food is. In the coming elections, it is important that political parties clearly show that the citizens how they would like to deal with the food crisis that we have,” Chilufya said.

He said with high levels of stunting in the country, issues of nutrition should be of great concern to political players.

“Today in Zambia, we have about 35 percent of our children under the age of five stunted and this is really worrisome in the sense that, it’s about the future of these children which is about to be shattered. So for any political players to show concern to the progress of this country, they really need to come out with a clear plan in terms of how they would like to deal with the food challenges,” said Chilufya.

“As HIVOS, we have began to implement a programme called Health Food Africa. In this programme, we are focusing on how we are producing the food and vis a vis we are looking at how are we applying our chemicals, how contaminated are our food, then apart from that we are also looking at how can we produce our food in a much more sustainable manner to ensure the health of this food. So we hope that political players in this case would come on board to make this countrywide and not only focus on a few places like Chongwe where we are implementing.”