Seek alternative strategy to tackling food insecurity – HOMEF to Nigerian govt

The Health of Mother Earth Foundation, HOMEF, has tasked the Nigerian government to seek safe alternatives to tackle the food crisis in the country rather than dabbling into Genetically Modified Organisms and all their attendant risks.

The group warned that introducing GMOs to solve the food insecurity crisis in the country was a wrong move that has now turned Nigeria into a dumping ground for questionable and unwholesome food products.

It said the government can resolve the food crisis by resolving all the security issues affecting food production, the circulation of food products and the preservation of produce from the farm to homes.

Dr Nnimmo Bassey, the Executive Director at HOMEF, who raised the concerns at a workshop for the judiciary on biosafety in Nigeria, noted that GMOs can jeopardise Nigeria’s capacity to achieve food security as they reduce biodiversity, corrupt local varieties and unnaturally alter healthy cells in the human system.

”Crops genetically engineered to resist herbicides introduce increased use of herbicides in the farm and that is quite destructive because it doesn’t only affect the target plants, it affects other crops altering their natural state. Now if you kill every other plant on a farm except the one you have planted you actually destroy the capacity of that land to be healthy and that doesn’t allow for food security.

”To achieve food security in Nigeria, we must recognize that food sovereignty secures food security. This means defending our native and indigenous species and ensuring that biodiversity is preserved.

”A situation where we introduce strange genes from unrelated varieties and species, like getting genetic material from an animal and putting them in a plant, is something that is unnatural and definitely could be harmful.

”We must ensure that food produced by farmers gets to the market and to the dining tables. Right now a lot of food is wasted because of bad infrastructure, lack of access to farms, and lack of storage facilities. Secondly, the government should invest in producing more extension officers. We need officials from the Ministry of Agriculture who can go around the farms in communities across the country to help farmers choose what seeds to plant.

”Most importantly, the issue of insecurity, farmers in many parts of the country are not able to go to farm, they can’t even go to the bush because of insecurity. So as long as farmers are being targeted by terrorists and killed they cannot farm, harvest or preserve their harvest, so no matter what kind of seeds you plant there will still be food problems until these situations are resolved.

On her part, the Director of Programs at HOMEF, Joyce Brown tasked the government to listen to the people and heed their demands, noting that many are now aware of the dangers of GMO which is already banned in many European and African countries.

She noted that the Nigerian populace is speaking up against GMOs, saying, ”What we need is support for smallholder farmers and to fix the insecurity issues that are keeping farmers away from the farm, there are many alternatives, one key one is agroecology that can actually help to revive degraded soils that are contributing to the issues of pests and diseases and the low yields that farmers are experiencing. So we need attention to be on these issues so that we can have a sustainable food system where the local farmers themselves are in control instead of pushing GMOs that we cannot control.”