 It really is a pleasure to join you in this final stage of the series of public dialogues exploring and analyzing the Nigerian food system in collaboration with the United Nations. The point of these dialogues is to effectively articulate feasible pathways to sustainable, resilient, and equitable food systems for Nigeria and indeed the world as we work towards realizing the vision of the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. You may recall that during the inception national dialogue, I and so many others emphasize the need to make these dialogues on food systems as reflective of our situations, especially our socioeconomic circumstances as possible. So what does this mean for Nigeria? We are faced with a population growth that exceeds our growth figures handsomely. Poverty, especially in the wake of the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, has dipened and it is clear that the economic circumstances have made a significant difference on poverty levels. Manutrition and unhealthy dietary practices have created unique threats to health and productivity for a very large segment of our population. A very huge number of children are undernourished as we've heard, stunted and or wasted. Manutrition and food insecurity make it much harder for children to learn and to gain the skills and knowledge that is needed to succeed in the workplace. It also increases the risk of developing chronic illnesses such as diabetes, heart diseases, etc. And we've heard from the presentation on the results from Dr. Kolab and Iggo about what all of these implications are. And I'm sure that the details of that will reveal to us that all of these problems are expensive for families, expensive for businesses, and expensive for governments to manage. So there is no question at all that a prolific and sustainable food system is critical to our nation's human capital development. So our food system must be resilient enough to significantly impact nutrition security and our collective efforts must reduce the man-nutrition numbers. We must realise that defining bold steps to improve food systems and by extension food security ensures that children have improved health and early development and increased intellectual and emotional readiness to learn. This translates as we've heard already to positive school engagement and improves the potential of children growing to healthy adults. On the other hand, imagine a generation of adults who suffer arrested physical and mental development and the social and economic burden on their families, on their communities and on the nation. Imagine the implications of approximately 50% of Nigeria's population being at risk if we don't get it right. So it's now up to us from here on to own the process and be ready to translate the recommendations of these dialogues to prompt action. This would mean embracing the challenges required in modernisation of farming practices and we've also heard even from the children that mechanisation is absolutely important. The reduction of post harvest losses is another critical issue and we must ensure that we practice environmentally sustainable production. We must empower communities by creating jobs and livelihoods to sustain the food systems that we desire. For the government of Nigeria, our commitment to sustainable food systems is one of the key strategies for eliminating poverty across Nigeria. We know that our target of lifting 100 million Nigerians out of poverty within a decade is achievable only if we focus on substantially improving agriculture and food systems, which assures us not just of good food but also decent jobs. This perspective on addressing hunger, malnutrition and poverty runs through all of our policy frameworks, including the recently launched national poverty reduction and growth strategy which the president launched last week and our nutrition policy that addresses the issues of sustainable and nutrition sensitive food systems. The nutrition council has already prioritised key nutrition actions that are impactful, cost effective, scalable and sustainable. So the call by the United Nations Secretary General is apt and timely and it provides us all the opportunity to holistically re-examine all the elements of our food systems in Nigeria. I have no doubt that the 39 dialogues that we've held nationally and sub-nationally have been accessible to all stakeholders and are able to identify those challenges that still clog the wills of our progress, especially in the relevant sectors. Let me therefore again appreciate the honourable ministers of agriculture, of health, of finance, budget and national planning, and the honourable ministers of state for budget and national planning for their very strong support and their knowledgeable contributions to this process. To the convener, Mrs Olisha Laito, the permanent secretary in the ministry of budget and national planning and her team, they deserve commendation for convening all of the three levels of this dialogue. All of the three levels of this dialogue prescribed by United Nations in collaboration with all the relevant stakeholders in the food value chain across Nigeria. We must also thank very much our development partners for their continued support for the development agenda of the government of Nigeria, particularly with their important roles in assuring the success of the dialogues at every stage. Today's consolidatory dialogue is for us to carefully examine all the critical issues identified at the various dialogues, to make inputs and suggestions and to improve on the reports of the various dialogues that have already been synthesised into three and ten years implementation. And those plans have already seen a snapshot of it from the presentation that was made a few minutes ago. But we're expected now to agree a roadmap for the revolutionary food system that we want for our nation. So your contributions to discussions in our various groups will greatly enhance the richness and usefulness of this dialogue process for all of us. We also have here a very important publication, the Nigeria Food System Mapping Report. Now this is a mapping report which covers the six geopolitical zones. And the report presents, amongst other things, the generic situation of Nigeria's food systems across all the six geopolitical zones. It presents findings on the obstacles to making food available and accessible to people in an efficient, sustainable manner. And the security constraints, we've heard quite a bit of that already, to agriculture, especially in the Northeast and other vulnerable areas. The findings also include food safety issues and the prevalence of malnutrition, as well as state production of food in every region of Nigeria. So I think that this publication is going to be extremely important and I'm going to invite members, those of the honourable ministers and the Deputy Secretary General of the UN to join me in a moment to present this report because I think it's a very important report and I hope every participant today will be able to get a copy of this report. So I hereby formally declare the Consolidatory Dialogue for the UN Food Systems Summit open.