Many Nigerians don’t know how to cook vegetables, meat – Prof Iwuagwu

Posted by Dr.Stella Iwuagwu | 2025 years ago | 398 times

Professor Stella Iwuagwu is a public health expert, director of Sustainable Demonstration Farms (SDF) in Orozo, Abuja, and executive director Centre for the Right to Health (CRH). In this interview with PAUL OKAH, she explains that she relocated from the United States in 2015 to become a public health farmer in order to curb maternal mortality and other forms of avoidable deaths resulting from unhealthy food, toxic environment, among others.

Why Sustainable Development Farms?

I call myself a public health farmer. Over 25 years, I have been in the area of public health advocacy. If you did a little research, you will find out that I have been involved in the area of HIV/AIDS, right to health, and issues around them. I came back to Nigeria and realized that things have been getting worse in the health sector and I started asking why. The health budget has dropped, infrastructure dilapidated, things have simply fallen apart, yet the population keeps growing by the day and people are getting sicker every day. In my village, you could get anything you want from the backyard. However, when I got home, they were practically buying everything from the market.

I started looking at the malnutrition rate and saw that a lot of children under five are malnourished. If children are malnourished, you can imagine what the state of the mothers is, because no mother would eat while the child is hungry, so that contributes to our maternal mortality rate. So, at the Centre for the Right to Health (CRH), one of the things we do is taking help to communities in rural areas. We realized that women are dying. I realized that we cannot get to the right to health until we get to the right to food. They say an apple a day keeps the doctor away, but are people eating the apple? Our people are being killed by what they have been eating. This is a result of too many chemicals, pesticides, and vehicle and generator fumes. Sometimes, you get so enamored with the canned and processed foods and preservatives contributing to poor health. You have diabetes, kidney, heart, and liver failures here and there; I mean, they are triggered by many of these chemicals, even over there. They send these chemicals to us and we use them to manufacture foods, but you can’t export most of these foods. They want organic food over there because it is wholesome.

What we are not eating is also killing us. Without balanced diets, our system cannot function. We feel deprived because we are not feeding our cells. When our cells are fed, our immune system will perform optimally. The more people have a poor immune system, because of poor eating habits, the more people we will have in our health system. It was on that premise that I felt we have to intervene. Our slogan is “there is no right to health without the right to healthy food and a healthy environment.” This is because we are eating food, but it is not healthy. It is killing us. I had to look at the environment too because it is filled with toxins. All the chemicals and pesticides we use do not even stay in the plants. They come out in the environment, causing climate change and threat to the whole world and we are contributing to it.

What is the relationship between SDF and Sustainable Development Goals?

How long you live is determined by the kind of food you eat and the kind of place you live. That is the social determinant of health. We cannot just focus on health and neglect the foundations of good health and wellness. We are dealing with disease care. When you are looking at health care and the things we will do to keep healthy, good food is number one, followed by the kind of environment we live in. Looking at it from the Sustainable Development Goals, when people eat well, we have shot down the bird of zero hunger. When we make sure they eat healthy food and stay in a healthy environment, goal number two will be achieved, that is healthcare. The other goal is poverty. People are spending so much money on health. Therefore, it is either you pay your farmer or you pay your doctor. If you eat well, your healthcare cost will crash and you will have money in your pocket.

What we are doing is teaching people how to grow their own food in their own backyard so that they will have what to eat and excess to sell. When you start selling, you will become an agropreneur and tackle zero poverty. Also, a hungry child cannot learn. UNESCO's four pillars of education talk about learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together, and learning to be. However, we are not paying much attention to learning to do and that’s part of what the farm’s agenda is about. We want to get our educational system to shift from just learning to know to learn to do. What they teach in schools, is it what people need to know about surviving at these perilous times? So, we teach basic skills to feed your cells, to do things with your hands.

You said something about the environment…

Of course, climate change is a major issue. We have a concept here. There is no waste in nature. Everything can be recycled. When you throw your pure water sachet into trash cans and pay someone to dispose of it, you are disposing of money, because waste can be recycled. Everything can be recycled to generate money and that’s part of what we are teaching here. The plastics, pure water sachets flow back into our soil and that scares me because our soil is contaminated. The roots cannot start struggling with nylon bags and it takes hundreds of years for these plastics to break down. They are releasing toxins, which flow down into the gutters and we are complaining of the flood.

Meanwhile, we are all contributing to the problem. The floods and chemicals end up in the rivers and are eaten by fish. Then fishermen will bring the same fish for us to eat and die. So, we teach people how these things connect so that solving one would lead to solving others. We want to attack the problem at its foundation. That’s the reason I started Sustainable Demonstration Farm. It is sustainable because we want to ensure that we continue to take proper care of our health. Mine may be a small place or a small idea, but if people imbibe the idea, we will begin to solve fundamental challenges.

My dream is that my type of farm should be in every community, city, local government area and university. We have students that come here for SIWES or IT, who have spent five years in the university but have never seen a rabbit. Some have no clue about snails, others could not tell the difference between a potato leaf and a beans leaf. So, we are a bridge between the Ivory Towers and communities. We want to implement the big researches by the university and make them accessible to the community. When students come here, I make sure they come with a research agenda. When you research, you will get answers and solutions to problems. Even if your findings cannot lead to a solution, you must have learnt something through your research.

So, the slogan that health is wealth applies here?

The Bible says “feed my flock.” For me, this is not just an economic agenda: it is a spiritual agenda. We call it the return to Eden. Eden is a place of wholeness, a place where there is food in abundance, peace and joy. If we can return to Eden by growing food in our landscape, everybody will have good food. All we have to do is to tend the Garden of Eden God has given us and then have enough to go round. When it because a success, all the conflict we are having will be no more. There is insecurity in Nigeria because people feel they are not getting enough food or what rightly belongs to them. People will stop killing each other because of food if there can grow organic pawpaw to exchange with yam and other types of food. If pastors plant food crops in the church landscape, they will have enough to give out and feed the flock, instead of depending on tithes to live. Even in schools, we want to teach them how to plant. Right now, people are bottling and selling health products harnessed from agricultural products, so I look forward to Nigerians taking advantage of the population to produce health products from agriculture to market and be self-employed. If you are tending your garden, you will be physically fit. There is nothing better than growing your seed. If we look after our environment, we will prosper.

Do you train farmers here?

We have a curriculum we use to train people. Many people retire from the civil service without a clue of what to do; so they die of boredom. It is not supposed to be so. They should come and experiment here, gain confidence and set up their own farms. We want to see rabbits and other birds in every home. We have outlets in Area 8, Area One and developing another one in Wuse Zone 5 where we sell organic foods. We hope to partner with people to have wholesome organic food. We call it farm-to-office-to-home, where we sell hygienically packaged organic foods to people. We partner with other farms and get what we don’t have from them. When you buy products from farmers, you get healthy products for cheaper prices. So, we hope there will be a farmer market in the country. Students come for excursions here, including couples. We have birthdays on the farm too, as some people just want to come and eat wholesome meals. Many Nigerians don’t know how to cook vegetables and meat; so, we do cooking demonstrations and training. We may be a small team in search of funding, but we have noble ideas and will expand.

 


 

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