Month: March 2026

Straight from the Strait of Hormuz

No matter the reason for warfare the environment and the innocent end up bearing the brunt of the inevitable destruction. This fact is clearly illustrated by the several ongoing smoldering and open conflicts that have led to this season being described as one of endless conflicts and violence. Many of these conflicts and wars have crude oil footprints, suggesting an underlying connection between energy grabbing and wars. The most glaring examples are the situations with Venezuela and Iran.

In all these situations of conflict the war waged by the USA and Israel on Iran highlights many distinct concerns. First, the shifting explanations as to why the first shots were fired suggest to some observers that crude oil and gas are major motivations. Crude oil, more than a drive for democracy, turned out to be the major reason for the assault on Venezuela. For Iran we are told they must not develop an atomic bomb. Indeed no nation should develop atomic bombs. Reality is that there are already about 13,400 nuclear weapons in the world today and these have a combined explosive yield of more than 360,000 times than the bombs detonated at Hiroshima during the Second World War. 

Second, it is much easier to find funds for destruction than for construction or building of lives. This explains why wars gulp close to $3 trillion a year while the budget for development and for tackling the climate chaos and loss of biodiversity hovers in the range of just billions of dollars. 

At a time when the world should be investing in climate adaptation and mitigation, funds are being gulped by the weapons industry and the oil moguls. At a time when talks should be on how to recover our collective humanity we are hearing moans over a depletion of stocks of missiles, suicide drones and sundry weapons of mass destruction. We are seeing the bombing of civilian infrastructure, chemical factories, hospitals, and schools. We are seeing ecocide planned, executed and bragged about without consequence. 

Unfortunately, one acknowledged common attribute of war mongers is that they know how to start wars but hardly ever how to end them. This may be because they are never in the line of fire, besides those from opinion polls.

The tourniquet introduced by Iran at the Strait of Hormuz should drive a strong message to every nation — that we live in a common ecosystem of interdependences. The Strait gets shut and straightaway the world feels the shock. While the missiles fly and sorrow, blood and tears afflict the innocent, the oil companies smile to the bank alongside the players in the military industrial complex. It is estimated, U.S. oil companies may garner up to $63 billion in excess profits from the price increases this year driven by the Iran war.    Experts also estimate that the U.S. may gain additional federal revenue of approximately $600 million/day from its output of 20 million barrels of crude oil per day. With a war that may end up costing an estimated $200 billion, would oil cushion the impact of deaths and destruction?

The paradoxical situation for Nigeria is that the sharp rise in the price of oil does not suggest more revenue for social services for the population. With a poor capacity in local refining, the nation depends on the importation of refined products and is thus totally exposed to the shocks related to global oil conflicts. Privately owned Dangote Refinery that could have cushioned the shocks is forced to import crude oil due to insufficient receipts of locally extracted crude which stands at less than the nation’s OPEC quota. Moreover, according to reports, 400,000 barrels of the 1.5 million barrels of Nigeria’s daily crude oil production goes to paying debts owed to international oil majors, banks and traders. Thus the pump price of petroleum products is translating to rising costs across board in an unregulated and evidently inefficient economic environment.

Added to the economic quagmire is the reality of the violence inflicted by crude oil extraction and refining on the environment of the Niger Delta. The region experienced an equivalent of one Exxon Valdez oil spill annually for close to 70 years. This level of violence is an undeclared war against the people and the environment.

Back in the Middle East, the explosion of missiles guided by artificial intelligence illustrate the artificiality of warfare fought without conscience and notions of accountability. It is a season of barbarism. Might is not always right. Stealth may sometimes be visible.

The shutting of the Strait of Hormuz (and possibly others) should wake the world from slumber to the essential need to phase out fossil fuels and invest in ecologically sensible alternative energy sources. The release of huge strategic reserves of oil by members of the International Energy Agency may bring a small respite, but the increasing price of oil has not appeared to abate. How much more barrels will be released when the reserves runs dry? Moreover, experts have noted that the current energy instability introduced by the war against Iran will not easily overcome even after the last missile has exploded. Reasons for this include the huge reconstruction that will be needed to restore damaged or obliterated infrastructure and to rebuild confidence in challenged geopolitical alliances and among sectoral players. 

The famous invisible hands of the market has been exposed by the apparent open manipulation of oil prices by statements made, sometimes on social media posts, by political leaders. This underscores the need for energy democracy and an end to dependence on energy resources that plungers the world into conflicts, financial turmoil, social disruptions and unimaginable destruction. The world needs an urgent phase out of fossil fuels, not digging in and fighting over them. This is the lesson straight from the Strait of Hormuz. 

Junk Foods and the Politics of Hunger

Food occupies a central place in our culture. It plays a key role in religious/social activities, and is a major marker of the passage of times and seasons. It is a celebration. Food unites people and families and marks one’s acceptance in a home, family,  or community. Food is not just an object thrown into the stomach to quench hunger. 

Not surprisingly, food varieties mark the peculiarity of ethnic nations and cultures. A tour of food varieties in a nation tells tales of the diversity of peoples in such nations. 

Over time and due to cross boundary interactions, certain foods have been adopted across nations. In Nigeria one can find restaurants serving amala,  ofe nsala, banga, afang soup and edikangikong virtually anywhere you go to. Internationally you are likely to find Chinese or Indian curry in most countries. And, the idea of an English breakfast is taken for granted.  The spread of food and the adoption of some have been spurred by commerce, colonialism and other factors.

Food and humanitarian aid were weaponized during the Biafra-Nigerian war and deeply impacted the diet and wellbeing of the people in the then Eastern Nigeria. I recall seeing that after the war, families ate less nutritious foods and those who were lucky ate more of eba made from cassava, the poor man’s crop. That was clearly attributable to displacement, blockages, destruction of livelihoods and other causes of poverty occasioned by the fratricidal war. Distended bellies were not signs of overeating, but often of kwashiokor.

Knowing that food is the anchor on which our culture is built, we must remind ourselves that for our people agriculture is a way of life, not just a business. Any policy or law that prohibits seed sharing is basically aimed at disrupting solidarity in our communities and replacing our communal power structures with ones built on exploitation, profiteering, poverty and hunger.

Food travels. Tastes are cultivated. Taste buds adjust to what is fashionable. This has birthed the fast or junk food and the related junk culture.  Fast foods caught on quickly because humans have become addicted to instant gratification. We want freshly made food but cannot wait for it for 30 minutes at the restaurant. So we all make a quick dash for the “food is ready” shop. To ensure the food is attractive the fast food outlets are brightly coloured, brightly lit and totally surrounded by music so loud your wrist watch warns that staying there for extended periods will lead to permanent hearing impairment. To keep you from pondering the food set before you, there are big screens in every direction offering you soccer, wrestling, music, violent news and war movies. Distracted and deafened we gulp the foods, enjoy the colours and sounds and go  away with a load of heavy metals, colourings and other loads in our guts.

When top politicians make a show of eating junk foods, and gulp litres of sugary beverages, they send a powerful but wrong message that obviously deviant junk culture is hip. 

Our worries do not end with fast foods. We are equally assailed by the rush of Frankenstein foods produced through genetic engineering. Many of such products are imported without queries into Nigeria. Some of the genetically modified (GM) crops are already in our farms, markets and dining tables. Those approving them swear they are safe for human consumption. We are served doses of insecticide as the GMOs are fabricated to kill certain pests. If junk foods birth junk culture, certainly genetically modified foods will produce transgenic cultures.

The biggest factor pushing these food cultures around the world is geopolitical in nature. Hegemonic control of cultural products go beyond movies and sink their claws into our food systems. Poverty, wars, debt, cultural manipulations open the way for food colonialism to take root. It is a power play arena and requires conscious efforts to halt, overcome and reverse. 

Decolonizing our food systems requires that we liberate our tongues and taste buds. It requires that we recover lost varieties. It requires that we reject GMOs. It requires that we preserve and share indigenous seeds and celebrate our foods. It requires that we expose the underlying market forces driving and influencing food system governance solely to their benefit and to the detriment of small holder farmers who feed the world and the attendant environmental and socio-cultural impacts.

We must critically examine the root causes or main drivers of hunger in Nigeria/Africa and resist its weaponisation to entrench a culture that does little or nothing to improve food systems but instead maximise profit for a handful of enterprises.

Who benefits from Hunger? Is hunger solely a question of productivity? Does hunger persist because farmers are not producing enough, even though in climes like Nigeria almost half of food produced goes to waste? How do global market relations and policies affect the rights of local food producers or their power to compete? These are pertinent questions that require deliberate attention and responses if our governments are serious about addressing hunger or food insecurity.

This session of our Sustain-Ability Academy brings to fore these questions amongst others and recommends critical recalibration of our food systems to ensure fairness and justice, resilience and sustain-ability.

Remarks at the Sustain-Ability Academy on Food, Power and the Politics of Hunger hosted by Health of Mother Earth Foundation and the Centre of Politics, University of Port Harcourt on 19 March 2026.

Defensive GMO regulators

The deployment of products of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) continues to raise concerns and resistance, not only in Nigeria but across the world among consumers, researchers, public health experts, food sovereignty campaigners and others. Nigeria’s National Biosafety Management Agency (NBMA) however, has continued to take on a defensive front on the matter rather than acknowledging and addressing critical concerns that are quite fundamental and evident. This we believe comes from a mindset that assumes science and technology especially such as is approved by some foreign entities cannot be flawed and that Nigeria or Africa cannot make a headway in agriculture without without deploying biotechnology.

A recent article in The Guardian titled Nigeria Is Not Experimenting With GMOs, It Is Regulating Them, presents genetically engineered crops as a fait accompli and the NBMA as adequately defending Nigeria’s biosafety.  The article almost reads like an NBMA public relations piece. The fact we must not forget is that  the agency is saddled with the  mandate to ensure that the practice of, and products from modern biotechnology do not harm human, animals, or plants health or the environment and they have said in the past that they are not set up to stop the deployment of GMOs but to regulate them. This begs for an interrogation of what regulation actually means. Shouldn’t regulation mean that GMOs should be banned altogether if they pose significant risks to humans and the environment? The the Precautionary Principle, a key principle of the Cartagena Protocol to which Nigeria is signatory, specifically advises caution and a halt in adoption of GMOs where there are threats to human and environmental safety.

One of the fundamental questions that the Nigerian government through the NBMA is yet to respond to is “ where are the results of long term and independent/peer reviewed risk assessment including feeding tests conducted that informs the safety of the four officially approved products for commercial planting in Nigeria and the 10 or more others approved for food, feed and processing? This is unarguably the surest way to build trust in the regulatory architecture, but such information is not on the website of the NBMA as of 6 March 2026. We cannot but say the country is experimenting with GMOs using Nigerians as test subjects with our soils/environment as the laboratory. This is clearly not the way to defend biosafety.

The loudest argument about the need for GMOs in Nigeria is that there is no other way to feed a burgeoning population. The fact that these artificial crops do not have a yield advantage over natural varieties when cultivated under similar conditions is simply overlooked. The overriding impetus for the broadcasting of the GMOs in Nigeria is the economic benefits the speculators and manufacturers of the seeds would reap, riding on their power and control over policy formulation and implementation. Profit at what cost? Or is it true as an official of the All Farmers Association of Nigeria (AFAN) stated at a public hearing organised by the House of Representatives in December 2024 that “it is better to eat and die than not to eat and die”? Meaning that because Nigeria’s population is huge, we should keep deploying GMOs irrespective of the quality of the food and the long-term impacts whether social, health or environmental, as long as food is available. 

But we must dig deeper even on the economic front. The cotton farmers who have planted GMOs for the longest time in Nigeria noted in 2024 that the GM Cotton (Bt Cotton) after 3 odd years of planting has not outperformed the conventional variety. They lamented that their soil was instead being degraded. This is possibly a result of the release of the CRY1Ab toxins (from Bacillus thuringiensis) in the Bt Cotton into the soils. Again, what cost are we willing to pay just to be in the league of countries deploying so-called cutting edge modern biotechnology in agriculture?

A second fundamental question that remains unanswered is who controls the GM seed market? This gives rise to several other questions: Who owns the intellectual property rights over the genetically modified seeds?  Here’s the catch: GMOs can and will contaminate our local varieties through cross pollination and other processes. What safeguards has the NBMA put in place to prevent gene transfer and contamination of Nigeria’s local seed varieties? Or are we content with depending solely on the intentional seed companies for seeds and for our subsistence in the long run?

A number of other countries have put in place total or partial bans on GMOs based on this risk of genetic contamination. In 2024, Mexico placed an indefinite ban on genetically engineered corn. The courts said from the evidence before it, genetically engineered corn posed “the risk of imminent harm to the environment.” Furthermore, they will “suspend all activities involving the planting of transgenic corn in the country and end the granting of permission for experimental and pilot commercial plantings.” This ruling provided a protection for the 20,000 varieties of corn grown in Mexico and Central America. What are we doing to protect Nigeria’s genetic resources from GMOs contamination? Mexico is the centre of origin of maize and this reality places responsibility on her to protect natural maize varieties from the corruption of transgenic varieties. Nigeria is the centre of origin of beans/cowpea, and yet our farms and markets are open to insecticidal GMO beans.

On this note we encourage the government at all levels to invest in the setting up of seed banks to ensure the preservation of local and high performing indigenous seed varieties.

Nigerians reserve the right to choose their food. GMOs approved for commercial cultivation and sale are not labeled. Although we do not believe labelling will be effective considering our socio-economic context, the absence of labelling signals a disregard for the rights of consumers and an avoidance of responsibility on the part of the producers GMOs. Releasing GMOs into the market without labels is against the spirit and intent of the biosafety law in Nigeria. This explains why the National Biosafety Management Agency (NBMA) Act lacks provision on strict liability. 

Many Nigerians are consuming imported processed foods bought from supermarkets without any idea that they are made from the genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The manner in which these items are imported into the country needs to be interrogated. Although the National Biosafety Management Agency (NBMA) has said illegal importation of GMOs into the country is being checked, these products are abundant in our market shelves (over 50 different brands including cereals, vegetable oils, spices, ice-cream, cake mixes etc) as revealed by a survey which Health of Mother Earth Foundation carried out across 10 Nigerian cities in 2018, 2019 and 2023.

We reinforce the call for a ban on GMOs in Nigeria. As recommended by the House of Representatives in 2024, no new GMOs should be approved in Nigeria pending a proper interrogation of the processes of approvals so far. We add that such an interrogation must include long term impacts on human and environmental health. The output of this exercise should be critically reviewed by independent scientists and other food system stakeholders. 

Nigeria’s approach to tackling food insecurity should be such that address the root causes of the problem. We cannot overlook the poor budgetary allocation to agriculture or the heightened insecurity that keeps farmers out of farms or the lack of basic infrastructure or the poor extension service etc and claim to be addressing food insecurity.

It is time to transition back to agroecology -which simply means farming in line with nature and in the light of our socio-cultural, economic and ecological context. Farming that ensures that science recognises local knowledge and that it serves the interest of the people. We must promote and protect farming that assures food security but much better food sovereignty by ensuring shorter value chains/better access to food, improved livelihoods for smallholder farmers and a protection of the rights of peoples.

GMOs only attempt to address the symptoms of major underlying food system issues while increasing profit for their proponents. The price to pay in terms of ecological damage, loss of biodiversity, health and economic implications far outweigh any fickle advantages they may seem to have. It is time to decolonize our food systems. 

People over profits!

Co-authored with Joyce Brown, a Public Health Scientist, Food Sovereignty Campaigner, and Director of Programmes at Health of Mother Earth Foundation