Category: Biosafety

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 

Rejecting Food Colonialism

According to a popular adage, “when solving a problem, dig at the roots instead of just hacking at the leaves”. The challenge of food insecurity in Nigeria/Africa requires a deliberate pause and critical thinking about the factors that have created it and a concerted effort at addressing them. Overlooking the root causes of food insecurity (including farmer-herder clashes, banditry), poor support for local farmers, poverty, inequality, inflation, climate change and others shows the lack of readiness to solve the problem.

The gates for the entry of GMOs into Nigeria were flung open in 2015 with the enactment of the National Biosafety Management Agency (NBMA) Act. This act was further expanded in 2019 to allow for gene editing and synthetic biology. Sadly the biosafety Act was preceded by the creation of National Biotechnology Development Agency (NABDA), an agency created to promote modern biotechnology. It was later christened National Biotechnology Research and Development Agency NBRDA). To be clear, this agency was established at a time there was no biosafety law in the country. The cart was clearly put before the horse and this seriously injured any effort to regulate the sector and ensure biosafety in the country. This is particularly so because the promotion agency has a deep embryonic connection with the agency that ought to regulate it. This warped governmental approach has made it impossible for policy makers to see biosafety as an existential issue.

These two agencies of government can be excused for seeing themselves as infallible and even as being the government itself. They see GMOs as a one size fits all solutions. They virtually forget other areas of modern biotechnology and set their eyes only on gutting our agricultural and food  systems,  Solutions such as the genetic engineering of plants/animals do not address these root causes and we should be worried that there is such an adamant push to entrench them in our food systems by the producers and their allies in government. There is obviously an open conspiracy to counter our best interests while locking in colonial controls over our agricultural and food systems.

GMOs are promoted in Nigeria on the premise of addressing food insecurity. However, after almost three decades since their introduction in the world, they have not eradicated or reduced hunger. Rather, they lock in the system that promotes hunger by degrading soils and poor harvests (case of Nigerian cotton farmers in 2024), reducing biodiversity, disregarding the knowledge of local food producers, and concentrating power in the hands of a few market players. 

GMOs ride on the wave of global fetishization of technology by which technology is considered a silver bullet. Besides the generally poor regulatory frameworks, GMOs directly impact on human as well as socio-economic rights of our peoples. The complex threats including environmental degradation, and loss of our food heritage make it expedient that we examine the push for GMOs on the continent more critically. We must debunk the notion that resisting GMOs is akin to opposing science or technology. Reject GMOs is also not a matter of fear, except the fear of being colonized with its attendant exploitation and humiliation.

It is important to stress that GMOs represent a paradigm shift in agriculture; they are not just an option or solution. We must think beyond the mythical temporary relief that is imagined or promised and consider what long term impacts they portend. GMOs are plants, animals, or microorganisms that have undergone fundamental changes at the cellular level and can no longer be considered natural. Most of them are engineered to withstand dangerous herbicides which kill other organisms except the engineered ones. Other crops are genetically engineered to act as pesticides aimed ostensibly to kill identified pests that would otherwise attack the crop or seeds. Examples include Bt Cotton and Bt Cowpea or beans approved for commercial planting and consumption in Nigeria.

GMOs represent the subversion of Africa’s food systems which was intentionally constructed through the colonization of thought — a phenomenon concretized through persistent coloniality of knowledge and power. You may wonder why anyone would subvert another’s food system. The reasons for this are many. The colonizers think and act in their own interests. This subversion covers every area of production and  ensures that labour is not invested for meeting local needs while expanding and consolidating labour to meet the needs of the colonizers. By emphasizing a cash economy, for instance, farmers are forced to neglect their own nutritional needs, and are derided as subsistence farmers, and are made to offer their labour in exchange for meager wages. When the exploiting colonizers are kind, they turn the farmers into mere out growers who own nothing, are given seeds to cultivate and are thereafter given a fraction of the harvests. The colonial powers scored double on this count by introducing slavish plantation agriculture which grabs lands, displaces communities and offers locals menial jobs as farm hands or guards. 

Colonial agriculture thrived not only by producing crops for export, but it also benefited from altering the appetites of the colonized. These changes did not happen only through advertisements; the indigenous foods were denigrated as uncivilized and sometimes simply forgotten due to a chronic absence of the crops or ingredients for preparing the foods. Today, the erosion of varieties is exacerbated by many related factors including genetic manipulations, hybridization of crop varieties, prevalence of junk foods and hostile seed laws.

Our farmers saved seeds are falsely deemed inefficient, whereas these seeds are indigenous and have the natural ability to adapt and thrive in prevailing circumstances in which they are grown. It must never be forgotten that our farmers have selected and preserved seeds, crops, and animal varieties over the centuries. They have kept a stock of varieties that both provide food and meet our medicinal, cultural and other needs. They kept the norms that preserved biodiversity. They practiced rotational farming, mixed cropping, strategic pastoralism, and seasonal fishing. They understood the rhythms of nature and maintained the natural equilibrium by being respectful of the Earth.

These practices are being threatened by the genetic modification of seeds particularly those that make up our staple foods. Core concerns about the control of seeds are being ignored by many but these should be confronted head on and now is the time to do so. Our farmers will be forced to depend on corporate seed entities for seeds as productivity of GM seeds typically degrades after the first planting. Overtime, we risk losing our genetic diversity and control of our seeds to these foreign entities who are merely after profits no matter the cost to human life or the environment.

Responsible use of technology in agriculture requires that we keep careful watch on their effect on human and environmental health. We also need to consider the fact that technologies that promote monoculture and erode our biodiversity are not sustain-able and must be avoided in a world that is almost at the brink of ecological collapse. We cannot afford to make a fetish of techno fixes or consider them to be silver bullets. We do not need GMOs to be able to produce enough food for our population. GMOs have not led to an increase of food production since their introduction. In 2025, it was reported that Tanzania achieved food sufficiency by 128% without GMOs and by increasing support for their local farmers and by promoting organic food production. Recent studies have revealed that more than 40% of food produced in Nigeria goes to waste due to lack of proper processing and storage facilities. This needs to be addressed.

We must decolonise our agricultural system. The ways to achieve this include the preservation of crop and animal varieties, rebuilding our food systems, thereby, recovering our culture. A decolonized agriculture invests in support systems for farmers, including by providing extension services and providing/upgrading rural infrastructure. It also means preserving local varieties, ensuring that farmers have access to land and, funding research institutions to build a knowledge base on healthy soils and resilient indigenous crops. It would also mean putting farmers on the driving seat of agricultural policy, elevating and prioritizing the precautionary principle in biosafety issues, and outlawing harmful herbicides and pesticides. It would again mean placing a swift moratorium on all types of agricultural modern biotechnology as this is a key means of eroding species varieties besides threatening outright extinctions.

Nigeria is at a critical point where we must decide on the way forward for food sovereignty. This is not just another symposium. It is a space where we must exert our rights, and demand for the liberation of our food system.

Keynote by Nnimmo Bassey, Executive Director of HOMEF, at the National Symposium on GMOs held at Qualibest Grand Hotel, Utako, Abuja, on 1 September 2025.

Recovering our Taste Buds

Food plays a critical role in the life of any community or nation. Food is at the centre of our cultures. Agricultural and food systems generate songs, dances, drama and other art forms that moderate the pulse of any community. Agricultural and food systems drive economies, identities and spirituality. 

Centre of origin of certain crop varieties simply highlight locations where Nature places those particular crops, for instance. Such crops are climate smart through years of adaptation to those locations. The foods they yield are prepared in particular ways based on the social realities and the preferences of the people. The mode of preparation and presentation are markers of cultural identities and moderate the taste buds of the people. 

There has been a distancing of our people from our cultural foods. We lost our taste buds to colonialism which promoted cash cropping and plantation agriculture rather than the mixed cropping that assured our forebears of nutritious foods from a wide variety of crops. Today we have a massive assault on African foods by reckless introduction of genetically modified foods, some of which are best known as pesticides. These crops do not only kill our soils and biodiversity, they directly assault our food systems and taste buds. That is why some agents of toxic foods can openly declare that “it is better to eat and die, than to not eat and die.” Such talks are declarations of intent to poison Nigerians without any compunction. As we always say, what we eat must not eat us!

Our food is Nigerian is inspired by My food is African campaign of the African Food Sovereignty Alliance, and aims to take us back to the place of recovering our taste buds. It is a call to celebrate our culture and to appreciate the bounties of Nature in our region. Most communities are known for certain foods. Same with nations. Where the foods cross borders there can be fierce competition over who cooks them best, like the legendary competition between Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal over who cooks the best jollof rice.

When we speak of amala, a Nigerian can easily identify which is the region of origin. Same when ofe nsala is mentioned. The same happens when one speaks of tuwo, starch, afang or edikang ikong. When you speak of akara, suya or bole, you are speaking of foods and snacks that have literally diffused into all cultures in Nigeria. Food unites a people.

The liberation of our taste buds from artificial and sometimes toxic foods is a push for recovery of our health and economies. African foods directly connect consumers to producers. We share seeds, have festivals linked to farming, fishing and hunting. Our food is best enjoyed when shared. Food is at the centre of families and communities. A family that eats together lives happily together. 

Take out foods and you’ve taken out, or stolen, the best part of us. 

Bring back our foods. Celebrate our food. Recover our stories. Rebuild our communities. Awaken our taste buds! 

Welcome words by Nnimmo Bassey at HOMEF’s Nigerian Food Festival held in Benin City on Tuesday 26 November 2024

Our Right to Safe Food

Nigeria, like many other African nations, stands at a crossroads to her food future. The stark choice is between adopting agricultural biotechnology in line with the industrial agriculture model or agreocology (regenerative agriculture). The former, in the guise of enhancing agricultural productivity, and fostering economic development, locks in monocultures, loss of biodiversity, seed monopoly and seed/food colonialism, while the latter delivers increased productivity and economic resilience and nourishes and revives ecosystems, strengthen local economies, mitigate climate/environmental crises, and promotes food sovereignty.

In this workshop, we will examine the very pressing and complex issues of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and biosafety. As judiciary officials in various capacities, entrusted with upholding the rule of law and ensuring justice prevails in our society, it is imperative that we are well-versed in the intricacies of this rapidly evolving field and risky technology.

GMOs ride on the wave of global fetishization of technology by which technology is considered a silver bullet. Besides posing difficulties to regulatory frameworks, they directly impact on human as well as socio-economic rights of our peoples. The complex threats and attendant risks of this technology makes it expedient that we examine the implications of GMOs through the lens of fundamental human rights. It is important to understand that GMOs represent a paradigm shift in agriculture. These are plants, animals, or microorganisms that have undergone fundamental changes at the cellular level and can no longer be considered natural. Most of them are engineered to withstand dangerous herbicides which kill other organisms except the engineered ones. Other crops are genetically engineered to act as pesticides aimed ostensibly to kill identified pests that would otherwise attack the crop or seeds. Examples include Bt Cotton and Bt Cowpea or beans approved for commercial release in Nigeria. The implication of eating a seed engineered to kill a pest is that you are eating a pesticide with unexamined implications including the microbes in our guts.

GMOs are promoted in Nigeria on the premise of addressing food insecurity. However, after almost three decades since their introduction in the world, they have not eradicated or reduced hunger. Rather, they lock in the system that promotes hunger by degrading soils, reducing biodiversity, disregarding the knowledge of local food producers, and concentrating power in the hands of a few market players. 

The hope of Nigeria dominating the international market and generating billions of US dollars is a pipe dream as nations who do not endorse genetically modified crops will not accept our products unless we wish to further make capital on the opacity in the handling and trading of these and other seeds.

The truth, distinguished participants is that we don’t need GMOs to feed our population. This technology threatens the lives and rights of our local farmers who have selected and preserved seeds, crops, and animal varieties over the centuries, who have kept a stock of varieties that both provide food and meet our medicinal and other needs. 

In a country like Nigeria, consumers are unable to exercise the right to choose whether to consume GMOs due to the peculiar way food is sold and consumed. We cannot label the foods and seeds largely sold on the roadside, in the traffic, and in an assortment of our informal markets. This is if labelling were to even be successfully enforced.

To enhance food production in Nigeria what is needed is the provision of supports to our family farmers and the adoption of farming methods that enhance the health of our soils. Healthy soils build ecosystem resilience to environmental stressors and build biodiversity instead of encouraging monocultures which help pests to thrive. We need a system that supports farmers with needed access to credits, land, infrastructure, and access to markets. We have a moral obligation to steward the Earth’s resources responsibly and to preserve the integrity of our ecosystems for present and future generations. These and more are what agroecology does.

As guardians of the law, it is pertinent to ensure that the Precautionary Principle is strictly applied when anyone wishes to introduce any genetically modified organism into Nigeria. The fact that there is a requirement for risk assessment during the application stage affirms that this is a risky technology. It should be considered unconscionable that public opinion is ignored or that promoters of the technology are also saddled with regulating same, or vice versa. 

The introduction, cultivation, and trade of GMOs at a minimum should adhere to robust regulatory frameworks that prioritize biosafety and safeguard the public interest. Nigeria, like many countries, has enacted legislation and established regulatory bodies to oversee the assessment, approval, and monitoring of GMOs. The National Biosafety Management Agency Act 2015 (as amended) is however froth with loopholes that prevent the legislation from adequately safeguarding the health and interest of the Nigerian people. Not withstanding, GMOs are approved for use in Nigeria in a way that does not conform to the provisions of the Act or global best standards. 

It is incumbent upon us to interpret and apply the provisions of the law judiciously, balancing the interests of innovation, agricultural sustain-ability, and public welfare. We cannot afford to turn our people into guinea pigs or deceive our farmers into believing they are given improved seeds when in fact they are trapped into planting seeds of dubious safety claims.

Furthermore, we must recognize the importance of transparency, public participation, and informed decision-making in matters concerning GMOs. The processes of approvals of GMOs so far do not recognise these elements as the responsible agency – the National Management Agency has gone ahead to approve GMOs despite objections based on scientific, and ethical concerns. 

As judges, we play a crucial role in adjudicating disputes, ensuring due process, and upholding the rights of all stakeholders, including farmers, consumers, and environmental advocates. Adjudicators should resist heavy pressures and influence of vested interests and ensure that decisions regarding GMOs are guided by the precautionary approach, ethical principles, and scientific evidence.  While technological advancements hold out promises, we must not compromise the safety of our people or the integrity of our ecosystems.

In conclusion, we note that it is imperative to approach the issue of GMOs and biosafety with the utmost diligence, impartiality, and commitment to upholding the principles of justice. It is our hope that this training will deepen our understanding, encourage meaningful dialogue, and resolve to promote the common good and sustain-able development.

Welcome.

Welcome Words by Nnimmo Bassey at HOMEF’s Training for Judiciary Officials on GMOs and Biosafety Held in Abuja on 22ndMarch 2024

Halting Ecological Crimes in Africa

The struggle for environmental justice in Africa is complex and broad. It is the continuation of the fight for the liberation of the continent and for socio-ecological transformation. It is a fact that the environment is our life; the soil, rivers and air are not inanimate or lifeless entities. We are rooted and anchored in our environment. Our roots are sunk into our environment and that is where our nourishment comes from. We do not see the Earth and her bountiful gifts as items that must be exploited, transformed, consumed or wasted. The understanding of the Earth as a living entity and not a dead thing warns that rapacious exploitation that disrupts her regenerative powers are acts of cruelty or Ecocide.  

We bear in mind that colonialism was erected on the right to subjugate, erase or diminish the right to life and the right to unfettered cultural expression of the colonized. In particular, the colonized were dehumanized and literally transformed into zombies working for the benefit of the colonial powers. Ecological pillage was permitted as long as it benefited the colonizers. This ethos has persisted and manifests in diverse forms. Grand theft by the colonial forces was seen as entrepreneurship. Genocide was overlooked as mere conquest. Slavery was seen as commerce. Extractivism was to be pursued relentlessly as any element left unexploited was considered a waste. Anything considered to be lifeless could be wasted with no compunction. So, most things had to die. The civilizers were purveyors of death. Death of individuals. Death of communities. Death of ecosystems. 

Thus, today people still ask: What would we do with the crude oil or fossil gas in our soil if we do not exploit them? In other words, how could we end poverty if we do not destroy our environment and grab all it could be forced to yield? We tolerate deforestation, unregulated industrial fishing and run a biosafety regulation system that promotes the introduction of needless genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and by doing so, endanger our biodiversity and compromise our environment and food systems.

Plunder is presented as inescapable and desired under the cloak of foreign investment. Political leaders in despoiled regions pliantly offer ease of doing business templates, tax holidays, sundry lax rules, and other neocolonial governance policies. The reign of exploitation and consumption without responsibility has driven Africa and indeed the world to the brink. The current civilization of death seeks ready investment in destruction through warfare and extractivism rather than in building resilience and adapting to the environmental changes that result from corporate and imperial misadventures. 

We are in a reign in which condescension is the hallmark of multilateralism. The collective action needed to tackle global warming has been reduced to puny nationally determined contributions that add up to nothing. Rather than recognizing and paying a  clear climate debt, we expend energy negotiating a loss and damage regime to be packaged as a humanitarian gesture. Pray, who negotiates what is offered as charity? 

Today, Africa is facing multiple ecological challenges. All of these have resulted from the actions of entities that have seen the continent as a sacrificial zone. While the world has come to the conclusion that there must be an urgent shift from dependence on fossil fuels, we are seeing massive  investments for the extraction of petroleum resources on the continent. And we must say that this investment comes with related infrastructure for the export of these resources out of the continent in a crass colonial pattern. A mere 1 percent of the labour force in the extractive sector in Africa are Africans. A mere 5 percent of investment in the sector is in Africa. More than 85 percent of the infrastructure for fossil gas in the continent is for export purposes. 

The shift to renewable energy brings the same old challenges to Africa. Extraction of critical minerals for renewable energy is done without prior consultation with and consent of our people. The continent’s environment is being degraded just as it has been with the extraction of oil/gas, gold, diamond, nickel, cobalt and other solid minerals. The array of solar panels and wind turbines could well become markers of crime scenes if precautionary measures are not taken now. 

Are we against renewable energy? No. They provide the best pathway towards ending the energy deficit on the continent. However, this should be pursued through discrete, autonomous and socialized ownership schemes. 

While the world knows that we must rebuild our biodiversity, what we see is the push towards more deforestation in Africa and for monoculture agriculture, all of which are against our best interest and that of  the world. A sore issue, land grabbing has not disappeared with the coming innovations. 

We have a great array of thinkers to lead the conversation at this conference that should move us resolutely towards environmental justice in Africa. As Eneke the bird said in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, since men have learned to shoot without missing, it would fly without perching. For us, until the despoilers of our environment halt their destructive acts, we will intensify our resistance and never give in to their designs. We believe this conference will not only break the yoke of colonialism, it will puncture the hold of coloniality. Our book, Politics of Turbulent Waters is one of the tools towards these ends.

Ten years ago, Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF) was birthed from a dream. It was a dream to have a think tank focused on approaching knowledge from the basis of diversity and built on a multiversity of co-learning and co-knowing tools. For ten years, with a team of vibrant and committed young activists, we have pursued knowledge and unearthed the roots of exploitation and despoliation of communities and nations on our continent. We have collaborated and stood with fishing, forest, farming, mining and oil field communities. We have worked as part of networks and movements for environmental and climate justice across the continent and the world at large. Ten years. And we are just starting!

Permit us to conclude with some recommendations and points to ponder. Every African nation should:

1. Commit to issuing an annual State of Environment Report to lay out the situation of things in their territories.

2. End destructive extraction no  matter the appeal of capital.

3. Demand climate debt for centuries of ecological exploitation and harms.

4. Require remediation, restoration of all degraded territories and pay reparations to direct victims or their heirs.

5. Support and promote food sovereignty including by adopting agroecology.

6. Adopt and promote African cultural tools and philosophies for holistic tackling of ecological challenges and for the healing and wellbeing of our peoples and communities.

7. Promote and provide renewable energy in a democratized manner.

8. Recognize our right to water, treat it as a public good, halt and reverse its privatization.

9. Recognize the rights of Mother Earth and codify Ecocide as a crime akin to genocide, war crimes and other unusual crimes.

10. Ensure that all Africans enjoy the right of living in a safe and satisfactory environment suitable for their progress as enshrined in the African Charter on Peoples and Human Rights.  

Welcome words by Nnimmo Bassey at Health of Mother Earth Foundation’s 10th Anniversary Conference with the theme ‘Advancing Environmental Justice in Africa’ held on 19 June 2023 at Abuja, Nigeria. 

Don’t Play Politics with our Environment

The town hall meeting has been convened to provide a platform for presidential candidates in the upcoming election in Nigeria to discuss their plans and strategies for addressing critical environmental and climate challenges facing the country. We thank the Vice Chancellor of this great university for playing host to this epochal event. We are also highly enthused by the fact that our youths are a majority in the audience. The future belongs to you and the seeds sown by those we elect will determine the level of wellbeing attainable in the coming decades. They could also determine your chances for survival. The subject of this town hall is fundamental for our survival and to living in dignity. 

Without a safe environment the enjoyment of human rights is impossible. The present Nigerian Constitution at Section 20 provides for environmental protection as one of the Fundamental Objectives and directive principles of state policy. It states that states shall protect and improve the environment and safeguard the water, air, forest and wild life of Nigeria. The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights expressly states at Article 24 that All peoples shall have the right to a general satisfactory environment favourable to their development. The Charter has been domesticated by Nigeria, thus, provides a basis for the justiciability of our right to a safe environment. 

The reality is that the focus of political leaders on the environment has been largely tokenish. The indicator that they care at all about the environment is often only when they move to destroy underserved and largely autonomous communities termed slums. It is this mindset that led to the destruction of Maroko (which was inhabited by over 300,000 people) in July 1990 and is now threatening Makoko community in Lagos. And sometimes a cosmetic sanitation exercise in which trash gets pulled out of drains and piled by the roadside until they get washed back into the drains. Although there is a designated ecological fund, its use has been characterized as mostly being for political ends.

The Environment Unites

We believe that serious focus on tackling the environmental problems in Nigeria could be a unifying factor in a nation faced with many divisive factors. Every region has significant ecological problems and investment in solving them would reduce the troubling reality of unemployment by providing needed supports to our largely informal economy. Our propensity to invest in mega projects serve more as means of financial extraction rather than meeting real social-economic needs of our people. We celebrate the construction of deep seaports, but do we have any fish port for the millions of our artisanal fishers?

Cross section of participants

Nigeria suffers from huge biodiversity loses. At a time when our farmers should be supported to build a farming system that works with nature, to preserve indigenous seeds and varieties, we are opening to all sorts of genetically engineered seeds and products in a very lax biosafety regulation regime that threatens our biosecurity and food security and ignores the precautionary principle. While the law requires labelling of GMOs as a cardinal requirement for their being permitted into our environment and to our dining tables, our social-cultural context and informal trading systems make labelling an impossibility. Since we cannot label, we should not permit. That is simple logic. Should we sacrifice our health and environmental sustainability, promote monoculture, and disrupt our agricultural systems for seed monopolies and promoters of pesticides, and other harmful inputs?

Environmental sustainability has lost much of its meaning since it is hung mostly on the economic plank which sees the environment as a thing to be exploited or transformed for the extraction of rents often termed foreign exchange earnings. This drive for foreign exchange has allowed rapacious exploitation that has scarred our environment and our peoples, leading to a catastrophic and shameful fall in life expectancy. 

Concepts such as the green economy, blue economy and the like, have been aped without any serious interrogation. These have built the scaffolds for the commodification of nature, exploitation of our people and entrenchment of colonial approaches that deepen poverty and lock in corruption and a lack of accountability. Some of these approaches have led to massive land and sea grabs and raised the potential of sky grabbing and ultimate loss of independence.

Existential Threats

The climate crisis is an existential threat to humanity, Nigerians, more so. The floods of 2022 took the lives of over 600 Nigerians and destroyed infrastructure and over one million homes. Now we have heard warnings about impending floods. This town hall should help us know how the candidates would address this perennial issue that is bound to get worse. Amid floods, Nigerians are battling with water stress and the blockage of water ways by invasive species across the nation.

The trend in political circles has been that Africa must persist in using fossil fuels to drive economic development because Africa has not contributed significantly to the harmful carbon stock in the atmosphere. A supporting argument to this is that renewable energy cannot drive industrialization. Before the conversation begins, let us place on the table that this argument is contestable. The entire nation of Greece was powered with renewable energy for 5 solid hours in October 2022. Overall, the European Union produced 22 percent of its electricity in 2022 from wind and solar power. If we wish to ignore that as a signal that change is coming, let us not ignore the fact that overall, although Europe is investing in fossil fuels infrastructure in Africa, they are taking steps to wean themselves of this same energy source. And, there has been a drop in energy demand as the people become more conscious of the climate crisis.

Will we continue to pollute our environment, extend the situation in the Niger Delta to Gombe, Bauchi, Lagos and elsewhere? Do we consider the fact that without a shift in the clean direction, we stand a chance of becoming the cemetery for internal combustion engines in the coming decade. What will the presidential candidates do to ensure that we don’t end up with stranded assets as the international oil companies divest and skip off with inordinate profits, even as our communities are already stranded. 

We are here to hear from our esteemed presidential candidates. The moderators will likely cover issues of droughts, desertification, deforestation, floods, coastal and gully erosion, oil, and other forms of pollutions. We would also like to know what they would do about the oil/gas well fire that has been raging since April 2020 at Ororo-1 field off the coast of Ondo State. Hopefully, we have a leader that will not keep a blind eye on such blatant ecocide. 

Uncontrolled artisanal mining, including of lithium right here in the Federal Capital, and the disturbing blasting of hills in the outskirts of Abuja for construction materials, pose serious environmental and social-cultural problems.

This town hall is as much a platform for the candidates to inform us of their plans for the environmental sector and a platform to sound a wakeup call to every Nigerian to hold office holders accountable for environmental actions or inaction. We cannot play politics with our environment because it holds the webs of life.

Four Presidential Candidates were in attendance were: Omoyele Sowore of African Action Congress, Dumebi Kachikwu of African Democratic Congress, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso represented by the NNPP Chairman, Prof. Rufa’i Ahmed Alkali and Adewole Adebayo of the Social Democratic Party. 

Welcome Address by Nnimmo Bassey, at the Presidential Town Hall on Environment and Climate Change held at the University of Abuja on Tuesday, 7 February 2023. The Town Hall was hosted by the University of Abuja in partnership with Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), Corporate Accountability and Popular Participation Africa (CAPPA) and We The People (WTP).

Food, Culture, and Colonialism

 The important position of indigenous food systems in the struggle for food sovereignty cannot be over emphasized. We understand this by reminding ourselves of what the concepts ‘colonial’ and ‘colonialism’ mean. The dictionary defines colonialism as “the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.” As telling as this definition is, it leaves wide swathes untouched. While it is true that colonialism is hugely built around political and economic planks, it also significantly impacts socio-cultural, environmental, agricultural, and other spheres. It impacts all these spheres by controlling and subverting what existed before the conquest. We need to emphasize these approaches: control and subversion. 

The subversion of food systems was intentionally constructed through the colonization of thought, a phenomenon that persists as coloniality. Why subvert a food system? The reasons for this are many. The colonizers needed to displace labour invested for local needs while expanding and consolidating labour to meet the needs of the colonizers. By emphasizing a cash economy, farmers were forced to neglect their own needs, derided as subsistence farmers, and were made to offer their labour in exchange for wages. The colonial powers scored double on this count by introducing plantation agriculture and bringing in the locals as farm hands. 

Plantation agriculture encapsulates the core practice of colonialism. It entailed land use conversion — often through massive deforestation and land grabbing. It also promoted monoculture by growing specific crops to meet specific needs of industry and colonial appetites. Monocultures damage soils as well as labour. In Nigeria, predominant plantations included those of oil palm, cocoa, rubber, and coffee. These crops were termed cash crops, meaning that they were cultivated for cash rather than for food. This approach persists today as our governments see useful agriculture as the one that earns foreign exchange, irrespective of the state of food insecurity in the nations. 

Colonial agriculture thrived not only by producing crops for export, but it also benefited from altering the appetites of the colonized. These changes did not happen only through advertisements, the indigenous foods were denigrated as uncivilized and sometimes simply forgotten due to a chronic absence of the crops or ingredients for preparing the foods. Today, the erosion of varieties is exacerbated by many related factors including the prevalence of junk foods, hybridization of crop varieties, genetic manipulations, and hostile seed laws. 

Farming for cash relegated diverse crop varieties needed to maintain nutritious food systems. The centrality of agriculture and food in our cultures got dramatically eroded through colonial plantation agriculture and the fixation on cash rather than seeing agriculture as a pattern of living. Industrial agriculture has led to the capture of the sector by corporations who care for profit more than the planet. They don’t only muddy the waters in our countries but also do much harm in multilateral spaces where they lobby to erode regulations and safety measures.

When it is said that farmers are poor and are not making a living from farming due to lack of value addition, we should examine the underlying factors to that state of affairs. And unless those factors are addressed, labelling farmers as resisting change or as lazy misses the point. When farmers become landless, that is a big problem. When farmers’ seeds are criminalized while seeds of doubtful value are promoted, those are debilitating factors. 

Our farmers have selected and preserved seeds, crops, and animal varieties over the centuries. They have kept a stock of varieties that both provide food and meet our medicinal and other needs. They kept the norms that preserved biodiversity. They practiced rotational farming, mixed cropping, and seasonal fishing. They understood the rhythms of nature and maintained the natural equilibrium by being respectful of the Earth. Colonial agricultural production for industrial and external markets led to the promotion of monoculture plantations. The prevalence of investment in industrial agriculture has given rise to monocultures of the mind, to use the title of a book by Vandana Shiva.[2] This mentality elevated the measuring of agricultural productivity per hectare without considering whether the land has been cultivated with a monocrop or with a multiplicity of crops. 

Liberating our Tongues, reviving our culture

Without doubt, the decolonization of agriculture is the way towards the preservation of crop and animal varieties, rebuilding our food systems, thereby, recovering our culture. A decolonized agriculture invests on support systems for farmers, including by providing extension services and providing/upgrading rural infrastructure. It also means preserving local varieties, ensuring that farmers have access to land and, funding research institutions to build a knowledge base on healthy soils and resilient indigenous crops. It would also mean putting farmers on the driving seat of agricultural policy, elevating the precautionary principle in biosafety issues, and outlawing harmful pesticides. It would again mean placing a moratorium on all types of agricultural modern biotechnology as this is a key means of eroding species varieties besides threatening outright extinctions.

Decolonizing our food system will liberate our tongues and bring back forgotten tastes. It is the way to revive our cultures and bring back vibrancy into the lives of our rural communities. Species harmed by chemical inputs in industrial agriculture would recover and play their roles in pollination, assuring farmers of bumper harvests and breaking the chains of import dependence. A decolonized food system uncovers the falsehood of genetically engineered crops presented as climate smart agriculture whereas, if anything, they are truly climate stupid.

Food and culture are inseparable. Food is at the centre of our festivals and ceremonies. Food sovereignty is achievable only in a decolonized food system. In such systems, we know where and how our foods are produced and our farmers are true knowledge holders and cannot be deceived to plant varieties they don’t know or want. A colonized food and agriculture system enslaves farmers, disconnects people from the soil and exposes citizens to great harm.

It is our duty to demand safe food, support our farmers, reject monoculture, and decolonize our foods and minds.

Opening words at the My Food is African media training hosted by Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF) on Wednesday, 25 January 2023 in Port Harcourt, Nigeria.

[2] Vandana Shiva (1993). Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology. Zeb books.

Biosafety in Shambles

We cannot afford to keep gambling with our biosafety. To do so is to set ourselves up for intergenerational consequences; needless to mention the current crises that are being exacerbated. Genetic modification and other new technologies including gene editing and synthetic biology which are applied in agriculture require critical evaluation for their implication not just on human/animal health but also on ecosystems and on the rights of our people.

Biosafety encompasses the actions, systems and policies that protect humans and environments from exposure to harmful biological agents. In agriculture, it involves the precautions taken to control the cultivation and distribution of genetically modified (GM) crops and products. 

Nigeria is a key actor when it comes to GMOs Biosafety. She signed the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety in May 2000 and ratified it in October 2003 in commitment to Global Biodiversity Management. However, questions remain over the implementation of the principles of biosafety, of the continuous assessment of the implications of products of genetically modified organisms on the people/environment and on the level of awareness of the public on the subject.

The Nigerian Biosafety Management Agency Act came into force on 18th April 2015 in the last days of the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan. That Act mandated the setting up of the National Biosafety Management Agency (NBMA) saddled with the responsibility “for providing regulatory framework, institutional and administrative mechanism for safety measures in the application of modern biotechnology in Nigeria with the view to preventing any adverse effect on human health, animals, plants and environment.”  

Since then, a plethora of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) products have been approved for release in the country. According to our report on the State of Biosafety in Nigeria, as of November 2020, the NBMA had issued nineteen permits for introduction of GMOs into the country – eight (8) for field trials, nine (9) for direct use as food and/or feed processing and two (2) for commercial release. GM Cowpea (beans) and GM Cotton were approved for market placement in 2019.  

In this year 2022, 2 permits have been issued: one for field trial of genetically modified potato and the other for commercial release of the HB4 wheat. 

These products are approved with very little public knowledge and where rigorous assessments are done and objections made by concerned organisations/individuals, they are neglected. This NBMA so far has acted more like a promoter of GMOs rather than as a regulator.

One case of focus today will be the genetically modified wheat (HB4 Wheat) approved in July 2022. Approval was granted to the applicant (Trigall Genetics S.A.) in merely a month after the application was received. No risk assessment document is available on the website of NBMA or the Biosafety Clearing House as of 25 July 2022.

Although it is claimed that the application is for commercialization and not for cultivation of the wheat, there is no guarantee that the GM event will not get into the hands of local farmers and contaminate indigenous varieties. The applicant states that “in the unlikely case of accidental release, risk to humans, animals and the environment are similar to the ones produced by conventional wheat.” This doesn’t make sense as they also say that the “traits found in the GM wheat event are not available in non-GM form of the crop.” 

 The HB4 Wheat was engineered to tolerate glufosinate ammonium which is known to be more toxic than glyphosate. There are thousands of cases in the USA over cancers resulting from the use of glyphosate. Residues of glufosinate in the wheat event poses a direct threat to human and animal health. In the likely event that this wheat is planted by farmers soil and water will be contaminated from intensive use of the glufosinate chemical. Although the wheat is self-fertile, it can cross-pollinate at a rate of up to 14% meaning that the HB4 genes will spread to and contaminate other wheat varieties.

These concerns with the HB4 wheat are common to the several other GM products approved for use in the country. Some GMOs are modified to act as pesticides (e.g the Bt Cowpea approved for commercial release in 2019 and already being distributed to farmers). We may have already started eating a pesticide in the name of beans. GMOs have economical (e.g loss of farmers’ rights to save, reuse and exchange seed), environmental (erosion of biodiversity, loss of indigenous varieties, advent of super pest/superweeds, toxicity of water, soil degradation) and health (immune system disorders, liver and kidney problems, cancers) implications that we cannot keep a blind eye to.

The right to safe and nutritious food is a universal right. GMOs challenge that right with the creation of novel organisms, dependence on toxic chemicals and abridgement of the rights of farmers to preserve and share seeds and to stay free from contamination by genetically engineered seeds.

The NBMA Act 2015 which mandated the setup of the Agency has several fundamental flaws that make it impossible to protect the interests of the public and avert the negative implications of GMOs on our health, economy, and environment. The gaps include lack of access to information, no provision for adequate stakeholder engagement or consultation and participation, defective provision for liability and redress, subjective decision-making, and skewed provisions for appeals and reviews. The law is uses slack terms such as “may” rather than “shall” therefore bestowing enormous discretionary power on the Agency. These loopholes create room for abuse of administrative powers and make allowance for gross injustice against the people of Nigeria and the environment.

Today as we discuss the issues surrounding GMOs biosafety, we hope you will focus particularly on the NBMA Act and see if the Agency as constituted is wired to serve the best biosafety interests of Nigeria or if it should be fundamentally reviewed. We hope that you, as legal experts, consider if there are issues of conflict of interest in a setting such as that of NBMA where board members such as National Biotechnology Development Agency (NABDA) are promoters of the risky technology and are also applicants that have benefited from the very first application to have come before the Agency. 

We hope that you will examine the implications of GMOs and advise whether they obstruct avenues for safety, justice, fairness, probity, and equity in our collective struggle for a food regime that ensures that we are not turned into guinea pigs by those pushing to colonize our food systems and expose us to avoidable risks.

Welcome words at the Workshop with Judiciary Officials on GMOs and Biosafety in Nigeria held on 4thAugust 2022 at Abuja

Reject Seed Colonialism in Africa

It has often been said that one of the ways to colonize a people is by dismantling or subverting their culture. This pathway is also effective for building dependency and disrupting the systems that organically secures the health of the populations. In terms of agricultural and food systems, the disruption is most effective when staple crops are targeted, appropriated through patenting and presented as mere merchandize. Food is fast becoming an instrument of control and power.

Science has been used as a cloak for the introduction of foods of dubious value and quality. The quest to solve perceived problems through artificial means introduces new problems, some of which can be intractable. Today we see unrelenting forces seeking to control our food and agricultural systems with attendant disregard for indigenous knowledge, natural cycles, biodiversity, and livelihoods of communities. 

We are concerned that food is being seen as a mere commodity or a mechanical or chemical product from a factory or laboratory. Truth is that eating is beyond swallowing food to satiate hunger; food has deep cultural and spiritual anchors with special significance in many religious observances. 

Food supply across Africa depends largely on the maintenance of a healthy and thriving biodiversity. Our farmers save, reproduce, and share seeds, understanding that these seeds encapsulate life. These communities engage in mixed cropping and harvest a mix of fruits, tubers and vegetables that yield foods that are rich and healthy, providing needed nutrition and building defenses against illnesses. They have a strong link to what is presented as food and harvests are never mechanical exercises. Moreover, many of our farmers do not see food production as mere business or for profit.

These practices are being threatened by the genetic modification of seeds particularly those that make up our staple foods.

Today we are speaking of the genetically engineered cowpea, popularly known as beans in Nigeria, and drawing attention to the fact that the insecticidal beans can also kill non-target organisms and that even the target pests can develop resistance. In the same vein, when crops are genetically engineered to withstand herbicides, we cannot ignore the fact that they kill other plants and microbial life and not only the so-called weeds. These modifications interfere with the webs of life in ecosystems, and this has intergenerational consequences. 

Although the promoters of the Bt cowpea claim that it will translate to improved food security in Nigeria due to availability of much higher amounts of cowpea, one concern that cannot be overlooked is that this GM variety will utterly contaminate natural varieties through cross pollination. This means that even where a farmer chooses not to grow the GM variety, the preferred natural variety will be contaminated. Thus, rather than promote food security, Nigeria/Africa is stepping into an era of uncertainty, of gross unpredictability and instability of food supply and resultant food insecurity.

The genetically engineered beans (recently approved for commercial release in Nigeria despite objections by HOMEF and several other stakeholders) is modified with the transgene Cry1Ab which has not been approved anywhere else in the world. Most of these genetically engineered events are prepared overseas and brought for testing in Africa and yet we boast that we are adequately equipped and innovative. The genetically engineered cowpea is originally a Monsanto product brought to Africa on supposedly humanitarian grounds. We insist that Africans must not be used as testing ground for novel and risky technologies.

Promoters of these risky technologies fight against strict liability clauses in national Biosafety laws. This has been experienced in Nigeria, in Zambia and in Uganda and so on. In Uganda a clause in their genetic engineering regulatory law was inserted to ensure that producers of GMOs will be held accountable for any harm that may come from cultivation or consumption of their products at any time, even if such effects manifest years later. Since then, GMO promoters and producers scientists have branded President Museveni and the Ugandan parliament as being anti-science. 

There are attempts to overlook the Precautionary Principle which is the bedrock of biosafety regulation. Simply put, the precautionary principle advice that where there are doubts regarding human, animal or environmental safety, we should hold the breaks. Good genetic engineering science must not leave room for doubt and when harms manifest, the producers should be held strictly liable. 

The speed with which Nigeria is permitting GMOs is highly suspicious and offers no assurance that the government is concerned about food safety, the preservation of our biodiversity or the rights of our indigenous peoples. Neighboring and other African countries should beware.

As you are already aware, this press conference is a platform for exposing the grave risks our food and agricultural systems face through the introduction of genetically modified beans. Besides the environmental and health risks, our people’s right to choose what variety to plant and what food to eat is absolutely breached by the introduction of the genetically engineered beans, a staple and critical source of protein for our peoples. The right of choice is eliminated because our food systems do not allow for labelling. This right is fundamental, and our people should not be ambushed to eat any risky material. We call on farmers to reject Bt Cowpea seeds and continue to protect our food system.

My welcome words at the International Press Conference on Bt Cowpea held on 7th March 2022 via Zoom