Month: November 2019

We Cannot Feed on Myths

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Moi moi made with GMO beans will not be labeled.

Myths don’t feed anyone. Small-scale farmers provide 80 percent of global food supply using a mere 25 percent of the resources in the food production sector. Industrial agriculture provides less than 20 percent of the global food supply using 75 percent of cultivated land. These stark statistics are from the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), not from some angry civil society group, and state the simple truth of the situation. Nevertheless, the world is gripped by the myth that small scale farmers cannot feed the world. How is that?

Industrial agriculture thrives on monocultures, pervert diversity and has inexorably forced humans to develop monocultures of the mind, to borrow the phrase from Dr VandanaShiva. A handful of corporations have cornered the seed and agricultural inputs market and so concentrated power in their control that governments, multilateral and research institutions find it difficult to stand up to them. To be clear, the corporate mafia has not cultivated the minds of policy drafters and makers through mere propaganda, they have achieved this through arm twisting, bribery and diverse devious ways.

Thus, you would hear otherwise respectable persons wave off small scale farmers as being incapable of feeding Nigerians, Africans and the world. We hear so much excuses for not supporting the hoes and sickles that feed us. They are dismissed as primitive, burdensome and not modern. Industrial agriculture offers the world well packaged foods, and these are hailed as what is feeding the world. The mafia is so powerful that even when in 2008, over 400 scientists and development experts under the United Nations-World Bank-sponsored International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) called for the revitalization of public sector agricultural research, small farmer-oriented, low-input agroecology, governments endorsed the report and quickly ignored it.

Today, the world denigrates agriculture that is aligned with nature and celebrates the propaganda from companies whose products can be traced to death sciences and who are now pushing products into the market under a false façade of being promoters of life sciences. How could chemicals that wipe out beneficial organisms, not just in soils but in our guts, be the product of life sciences?

Makers and promoters of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have been hard pressed to sell their artificial and unnatural crops and animals. They have achieved the spread currently attained through all manner of approaches: political pressure and blackmail, illegal introductions through irreversible contaminations and through basket-case biosafety regulatory systems.

If we agree to the FAO findings, then it should be self evident that GMOs are unnecessary. The arguments for introducing them are untenable except for those who prefer to swallow whatever is offered as food. Our small-scale farmers require support, including through extension services, rural infrastructure, storage facilities and access to markets. Agriculture is a highly subsidized business in many countries. Why is it a taboo to support our small-scale farmers? Is it not clear that those who insist that there should be no subsidies in the agricultural sector, and no critical support except through wasteful and harmful fertilizer distributions, are actually sabotaging our food system?

Matters got worse for Nigeria because somehow the nation set up an institution whose mandate is to develop biotechnology before making a law to regulate the sector. Once the biotech foot was in the door, it became the duty of the promoter to facilitate the development of the regulatory framework. This explains the porous regulatory system as well as the incestuous relationship between the promoters and the regulators. They simply find it impossible to stand apart. And, so you find the regulator spending a bulk of their time talking about the safety GMOs.

We are told that GMOs yield higher than natural varieties. This has been shown through scientific studies to be a false claim. Another claim is that with GMOs, farmers will use less chemicals because some of the crops are engineered to act as pesticides. We are also told that the GMOs designed to tolerate certain herbicides reduce the application of the chemicals in farms. Both claims are not only patently false, they have been shown to try to conceal harmful repercussions of dependence on the pesticidal crops and chemicals.

First, the herbicide tolerant crops may actually withstand the chemicals, such as Monsanto’s Roundup Ready which is all over the Nigerian market. However, the weeds they try to kill have been known to build resistance and become super weeds, requiring higher doses of the lethal poisons. These chemicals don’t only kill weeds, they kill other beneficial organisms in the soil and in waters where they may be washed into. We should state here that Roundup Ready has glyphosate as a major component and this is a carcinogen. Thousands of cases have been instituted against Monsanto (and Bayer who bought the company) over the deadly health effects suffered by users of the chemical. That chemical is all over our markets, complete with NAFDAC numbers.

Second, some of the GMOs, such as Bt cotton and Bt beans, are designed to kill target pests. They are created by genetically altering their genome to express a microbial protein from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. The argument is that the bacterium is found in soils, is safe and should be no cause for concern. The inconvenient truth is that the naturally occurring Bt is not exactly the same as the genetically engineered Bt. The natural Bt has a shorter half life when exposed to sunlight, but the biotech variant persists with implications and consequences, including for our gut organisms. Bt Cotton was trumpeted as dramatically reducing the use of pesticides on the crop as they were supposed to kill the target bollworm pests. The crop has failed to kill off bollworms in India and farmers have had to use more pesticides and suffered economic woes as a result of the failure. Cotton farmers in Burkina Faso complained of this failure, besides the fact of poor-quality fibers. It is that failure that is being celebrated in Nigeria.

In many countries there are strong demands for labeling of GMOs so that consumers would have a choice of whether to eat such foods or not. The issue should not even arise in Nigeria because the way we package, sell and consume many of our foods simply make it impossible to label them. Who would label genetically modified ogi, akara, eko, moi moi, garri, epa and the rest?

As we interrogate GMOs today, we have to keep an eye on the new extremes variants that have emerged. These ones do not involve transference of genetic materials between species. Whereas old school GMOs tried to reduce the need to weed frequently or to kill off pests, the new variants, among other things, are essentially extinction GMOs. They also try to upturn nature, are prone to being weaponised and introduce traits with unpredictable and dire consequences for the future.

If the earlier GMOs had inputs from a war or poison mindset, and lead to erosion of biodiversity, the new ones aim to completely annihilate our understanding of agriculture and the care for Nature and her children. They herald a system of greed before life and an age of warfare without gunpowder. False claims continue to swirl wherever we look. It is time for us to wake up. Enough of these myths. Myths never fed anyone!

When Pain Speaks

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Gas Flare in the Niger Delta. Photo credit: O. Igbuzor

The colonisation of the Nature persists in its raw form and tends to be intensified as time goes by. The intensification of the colonisation of Nature increases as resources that humans have learned to transform for the preservation of current civilisations run out. The dearth of resources to be exploited should have been obvious to humans since we live on a finite planet. The race for what can still be reached has thrown up situations where governments are not necessarily defined by political ideologies but by their stance towards dependency on revenue and materials from extractive activities and on corporate forces that support their electoral needs.

The range of political leadership we see in the world today tends to be birthed by alignment of perception of populations on which leadership promises to bring back the good old days. The factor of nostalgia has sometimes been spiced with a promise to bring about change. Common in all situations is the fact that the voters do not question the past that they desire and do not interrogate the promised change. The result has been that the disappointing reality sets in very quickly when the promises turn to dust.

The thought pattern that offers Nature as something to be exploited has become so ingrained that we only wake up to ask questions when the environment is thoroughly degraded and where damage can no longer be compensated for. The heavy loss and damage tied to the extractivist model has gone so deep that financial compensation cannot sufficiently pay for the harms. This shows clearly that the remedies must be sought on the altar of justice. Humans need to seek a reconciliation with Nature of which we are an integral part. One pathway towards this reconciliation is through the acceptance of ecocide as a crime punishable under national and international laws. The acceptance of ecocide as a crime will greatly incentivize good behaviour by ecological devourers.

The abandonment of social responsibilities by governments is one of the reasons for the spate of protests going on in the world today. And it does appear that the protests will continue until governments wake up to the fact that they are elected to govern and not to babysit corporations and otherswho profiteer from the misery of citizens.

Reconciliation with Nature will take both physical and cultural actions. It will require an acceptance that carrying out so-called corporate social responsibility acts are blatantly hypocritical when the harm done is irreversible. Beautiful concepts like benefit sharing should be seen as drawing in victims as accessories to crimes when the ecological harms done in the process of resource exploitation cannot be remedied. Talks of good governance and transparency stand out as scaffolds for continued irresponsible exploitation in many cases when it is known that the baseline for assessing transparency is not in existence in the first place.

The cultural actions that require immediate consideration have to do with our mindsets. For too long, policies have been based on ideas formulated to ensure that the oppressive and exploitative systems persist. We accept concepts such as green or blue economies without question. Some policy makers even swear that the blue economy is Africa’s chance to enter the development train. We do not even pause to question the origins of the concept of development and the classification of nations as developed, developing or underdeveloped. So unthinking have we been that there was a time nations competed to be classified as poor and highly indebted nations so as to qualify for loans and prescriptions that would actually ensure their poverty.

And, have you considered the concepts of cash cropping as a major means of foreign exchange earning by governments? Where did the idea that you can literally cultivate crops for cash and not for food take root in our psyches? Think about that.

The pursuit and accumulation of cash has become the reason for living by many. Those who are not able to raise enough cash to cover more than their daily needs are seen as poor and as failures. Humans have accepted the notion that collective organisation provided by government should only be for the purpose of propping up corporate interests and the powerful forces behind them. People readily mouth the falsehood that governments have no business in business and extend that to mean that citizens must pay for everything. Allowing citizens to swim or sink has become the creed and this further opens the scope for exploitation of the helpless.

Governments pursue revenue generation and do all they can to ensure the enlargement of the space for ease of doing business. You don’t hear of ease of survival for citizens of nations. No, there are no measures for that. We speak up against child labour, but we have normalized poverty and force kids to work in order to support parents whose labour cannot pay their bills. So we have children buried in mines for hours, digging up metals that end up adorning the rich and the powerful. We see artisanal miners breaking their backs and getting buried in unsafe mine pits across the African continent. And, then we point our fingers to accuse these struggling citizens with notions that poverty drives ecological degradation. No one asks to unearth the roots of the calamitous circumstances that we live in and the extent to which the planet has been wreaked.

The abandonment of social responsibilities by governments is one of the reasons for the spate of protests going on in the world today. And it does appear that the protests will continue until governments wake up to the fact that they are elected to govern and not to babysit corporations and otherswho profiteer from the misery of citizens. And we should add here that laws like the proposed Hate Speech bill in Nigeria cannot stem the tide of pains that must be voiced.

 

 

 

 

Infernal Gas Flares

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ground level gas flare

The gas flares in the Niger Delta are absolutely obnoxious. When 2020 was set as the deadline for halting gas flaring in Nigeria it seemed like ages away. As 2019 rolls towards its terminal point, 2020 is already placing its foot in the door. While launching the Nigerian Gas Flare Commercialization Programme (NGFCP) in 2016, the indication was given that the nation would pursue a 2020 flare-out date. The nation also signed unto the Global Gas Flaring Partnership (GGFP) principles aiming at a flares-out date of 2030.

It is interesting to note that the Federal Government of Nigeria has been pursuing two deadlines on the same objective. Given our laziness about meeting deadlines, it was obvious to observers that 2020 was a smokescreen and could not be a date to bank on. Nevertheless, the then Minister of State for Petroleum, Ibe Kachukwu, was particularly insistent that the year was sacrosanct.

The reasons for such optimism included the fact that up to 800 companies had submitted bids for the management of 176 gas flare sites in the Niger Delta and of the 800 bidders, 226 had paid stipulated fees as part of their expression of interest to manage the gas flare sites. Needless to say that as 2020 rolls in, that target has quietly evaporated.

We should remind ourselves that gas flaring commenced in the Niger Delta in the 1950s. We should also remind ourselves that gas flaring is inevitable in any oil field that has gas associated with the crude oil being extracted. Such gases are usually vented or flared in order to avoid uncontrollable build up of pressure in such installations. The flares are occasionally lit and then put off until when pressure mounts again. However, the gas furnaces that have ravaged the Niger Delta are not lit to relieve pressure from the oil fields, they are simply lit to waste the gas, as if no one would ever complain over the waste or poisons. This sort of burning of the resource is termed routine gas flaring. This routine flaring is the permanent insult that operators have relentlessly piled on our peoples and the Niger Delta environment.

We were told that President Muhammad Buhari is totally against gas flaring in the Niger Delta and was doing everything to ensure that the infernal flames are snuffed out for good. That position seems plausible considering the fact that the decree outlawing gas flaring came into force on 1st January 1984, during his tenure as a military Head of State. Secondly, in 2018 the government issued the Flare Gas (Prevention of Waste and Pollution) Regulation.

… the operators must give accurate data or face the penalty of paying a fine of N50,000 (fifty thousand Naira) or being imprisoned for six months. It is not clear if Nigeria can jail a company. But going by the trend of things that may not be a impossible task to accomplish as our security and judicial officers appear to be getting more creative by the day. But, come on, a N50,000 Naira or a mere $139 (one hundred and thirty nine US Dollars) fine against an oil company dishing out false data? That does not even sound like a good joke.

Notable features of the 2018 Gas Flare Regulation include the fact that the Federal Government now owns all the gas flares stacks and all the flared gas. That sounds rather funny, but the reason the claim is made can be assumed to have arisen from the fact that investors were denied access to the flared gas by operating oil companies. It is not clear whether government would still expect oil companies to pay fines for flaring gas now that government has claimed ownership of the gas flare stacks. Or will the government now be the offending party? By reason of owning the gas flares, access to flared gas to be utilized for commercialization or otherwise is now to be obtained from the Petroleum Minister, who in this case is the President.

The Regulation also requires that the producers are to maintain a daily log of gas flared. The interesting point here is that government agencies are unable to measure or meter the volume of gas flared in the country. Neither are they able to measure the actual volume of crude oil extracted on a daily basis in the country. So, when we say that 8 billion cubic meters of gas is flared annually, we are simply throwing out a guesstimate. Government agencies depend on oil and gas companies to declare the volumes of gas extracted and flared.

This brings us to another point in the Regulation which stipulates that the Directorate of Petroleum Resources (DPR) may demand for gas flare data from the operators. It also adds that the operators must give accurate data or face the penalty of paying a fine of N50,000 (fifty thousand Naira) or being imprisoned for six months. It is not clear if Nigeria can jail a company. But going by the trend of things that may not be a impossible task to accomplish as our security and judicial officers appear to be getting more creative by the day. But, come on, a N50,000 Naira or a mere $139 (one hundred and thirty nine US Dollars) fine against an oil company dishing out false data? That does not even sound like a good joke.

Back to the flares-out deadlines. In the 1960s noises were already made about the need to halt the obnoxious act of gas flaring. As already mentioned, the first deadline was 1 January 1984. That deadline was shifted to 2007 and to 2008 and 2010 and then to 2020. These shifting goalposts have been made attractive to the oil companies because the Decree or Act outlawing gas flaring allows companies to flare gas provided they had obtained a permit to do so from the Minister of Petroleum. Besides obtaining a certificate to flare the harmful gases, they are to pay a fine. In 1979 that fine was pegged at 0.003 US dollars per million cubic feet of gas flared. By 1988 the fine rose to a handsome 0.07 dollars. In January 2008 the fine was set at 3.50 dollars for 1000 cubic feet of gas flared. From report, this figure was simply ignored. In 2018 the fine was pegged at 2.0 dollars per 1000 cubic feet of gas flared.

The gas flare game has continued due to the sort of Joint Venture arrangements in place in the country. The operators call the shots, including with regard to measuring the gas produced and flared as well as oil produced, spilled or stolen. The recent report by Nigeria Extractive Industry Transparency Initative (NEITI) suggesting that an outrageous $11 million worth of crude oil is stolen daily in Nigeria did not raise a significant number of eyebrows, beyond making news headlines. Some observers believe that although the figure shared by NEITI may be conservative, it does suggest that the malfeasance in the oil and gas fields fester on an industrial scale and we should stop blaming the victims.

The entire petroleum sector architecture needs to be urgently deconstructed and reordered, including by stopping gas flares by 2020, by all means necessary. Thirty five years after outlawing gas flaring, and fourteen years after a High Court declared the act an assault on our human rights, we have no reason to further kick the deadline down the road.

 

 

 

 

 

Moving COP25, Leaving the People

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Moving COP25, Leaving the People. That  sums up the sudden shift of venue of the climate conference.  With millions of Chileans protesting economic hardship and inequality in that nation, moving COP25 to Spain does nothing to resolve the political quagmire. A week ago, President Sebastian Pinera of Chile announced that his country would not host COP25 in December. Neither will it host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) trade summit they were to host in November 2019.It is not surprising that civil society in Chile rejected the reasons offered by the president for not hosting the COP. The Civil Society for Climate Action insists that the climate summit was an opportunity for the government to take steps that would make life better for the citizens.

The decision by Chile not to host COP25 did not mean that the conference would not hold. It simply meant that the UNFCCC had to find another host to fill the gap at short notice. It should be stated here that this was not be the first time the COP had not been held in a designated venue. In 2017, Fiji was the host of COP23, but the conference took place in Bonn, Germany and not in Fiji. The reason was that although it would have been a perfect occasion to showcase the existential threat of climate change to the small island nation, Fiji did not have the facilities to cope with the requirements of the mammoth conference. Fiji nevertheless brought her atmosphere to Bonn through a number of means, including especially the innovative Talanoa Dialogue that took place in Katowice, Poland during COP24.

Fiji presided over the COP that held in Bonn, Germany, although it was not held on its soil or in its waters. In the present case, Chile is not seeking to host the COP offshore, she has simply reneged on her right to host it. Now Spain has stepped in and offered to host the COP in Madrid.

The Chilean government had gone a long way to ensure a high attendance at the COP. For example, they offered to issue electronic visas, at no cost, to duly accredited participants. Now that the COP is shifting to Spain many delegates may be unable to scale the immigration walls the new host may erect.

We note also that when Chile declared they would not host the COP they did not indicate that they were seeking an alternate host. They simply stepped aside. Will it be legitimate for Chile to preside over COP25 in Spain? On what grounds would that happen? 

We recall that the Secretary General of the United Nations gathered world leaders at a climate summit at the UN headquarters in New York in September 2019. Could the COP not be shelved until 2020? Did that space not provide enough room for climate discussions and decisions? The answer to both questions is ‘No.’ Multilateral negotiations and decisions are made at the COP, not in special climate summits. The September meeting was however very significant as it was the space for nations to report on their readiness to increase their levels of ambition for climate action. To prod nations to step up their intentions, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) published a report titled The Heat is On.

Ms. Amina Mohammed, the Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations said of the Summit: “When I look back on this Climate Action Summit, I want us to see it as a sling shot – that helped to change our common trajectory towards sustainability” [building trust] “between this generation of adults and the next – between our children and ourselves – that we are all working together to our fullest potential to tackle the climate emergency”.

That was a pointed statement that should wake up nations hiding behind the permissive Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) allowed in the Paris Agreement. The NDCs allow nations to suggest what level of actions they intendto take. The UNDP report showed that except for countries that have contributed little to the climate crisis, and whose highly ambitious intentions may not necessarily make much impact on the current climate trajectory, the big polluters were content to procrastinate as to when they may take some serious action.

The conclusion is that the updated NDCs the nations will take to COP25, no matter where or when it is hosted, will not provide any reason for celebration with regard to real climate action or finance.

The situation in Chile is a triumph of popular resistance. That nation has been embroiled in popular uprising and massive repression of dissent over the last three weeks. The decision made by the government of Chile not to host the COP has been forced by public pressure. Analysts believe that Chile had been achieving a pyrrhic economic progress built around a modelof deregulated markets and privatized social security services imposed by the previous dictatorship of General Pinochet. While the country recorded increases in its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) indices, the levels of inequality in the nation continued to grow.

In Ecuador, popular resistance forced the governmentto halt its march towards the debt trap inherent in loans offered by the notorious International Monetary Fund (IMF). The uprising also forced the government to reverse the increase in the price of gas in the country. The world is shifting into a revolutionary moment, when citizens can point at the direction things should go and not cede their sovereignty to elected officials and private interests. It is in this sense that we should look at the shift of venue of COP25. It may disrupt many plans, but should be seen as a real pointer to the reality that popular action can ensure that the will of the people prevails over the insatiable interests of the one per cent.

While we applaud Spain for stepping in so quickly, we cannot avoid noting that the shift from Chile to Spain without allowing time for reconfiguring participation arrangements by citizens and organizations who may not have access to public funds is very insensitive. There appears to have been no consideration given to the expenditure already made in purchase of tickets, some of which may be nonrefundable, and hotel bookings. What happens to the arrangements made by Chilean civil society to host activities at the Peoples’ spaces? How would civil society groups fund their participation in Spain at such a short notice, especially knowing how difficult it may be to obtain entry visas which were assured with regard to Chile?

We note also that when Chile declared they would not host the COP they did not indicate that they were seeking an alternate host. They simply stepped aside. Will it be legitimate for Chile to preside over COP25 in Spain? On what grounds would that happen?

What is the government of Spain doing to tackle the demands of the citizens that led to the protests in that country? Shifting the COP to Spain does not address the  socio-economic demands of the people of Chile. In fact, as Chile presides over COP25 in Spain it will be sending a disturbing signal that governments are willing to take convenient, face-saving and superficial actions rather than tackling the deep socio-political and economic issues that hurt the people and keep driving climate change.

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Note: This is a variant of an article  issued on 31 October 2019.