- Dr. Kelvin Meyeyin-Bala
While
analyses of food and water insecurity often discuss it as a developmental or
humanitarian issue apart from public health stability, its causal pathways with
public health are immediate, robust, and especially potent in fragile state
contexts of weak governance and the attendant constraints that influence their
capacity to manage resource paucity. This paper discusses food and water
security as structural drivers of public health stability in Nigeria, which is
positioned amongst one of the most fragile states in the world and suffers
periodic droughts, desertification, flooding, and the conflict induced
deterioration of water and agricultural systems. Extending the
entitlement-failure perspective to food security (Sen, 1981) and well-known
water security perspectives, it identifies two key public health pathways of
importance: first, the nutrition-infection vicious cycle where food insecurity
increases vulnerability to and severity of infectious diseases especially among
children, and second, the water-insecurity-to-waterborne diseases causal loop
driven by the absence of safe, adequate and affordable water access and hygiene
infrastructure. In fragile state contexts like those found in Nigeria’s North
East, Lake Chad Basin or farmer-herder middle belt corridors food and water
insecurity interact with conflict and weak governance to generate vicious
policy feedbacks: dearth of water and food fuels conflict and displacement,
which weakens their access to reliable food and water systems, in turn
increasing susceptibility to food- and waterborne disease outbreaks (Ioryue,
2024; IFPRI, 2026). Policy implications are drawn out on how to use food and
water insecurity metrics in a country’s public health early warning system, as
well as how humanitarian, development, and health funding channels could be
brought to bear on a collective threat.
Keywords: food security, water security, fragile states, public health, Nigeria, malnutrition, WASH, environmental security