Food safety experts, scientists and farmers have once again called for a total ban on genetically modified organisms, GMOs in Nigeria, highlighting its negative impacts on the human system and long-term effects on the nation’s food sovereignty and security.
The coalition of experts, including the Health of Mother Earth Foundation, HOMEF, also tasked the Nigerian government to adopt and promote agroecology principles and practices, revive extension services, establish seed banks and outlaw GMOs until a proper assessment of their safety is assured.
The latest call was made at a press briefing in Abuja by HOMEF and its partners, following its recent presentation at a public hearing organised by members of the House of Representatives Committee on Agricultural Production and the Minister of Agriculture and Food Security.
Countering proponents of GMOs on their safety, the Director of Programmes at HOMEF, Joyce Brown warned that genetically modified foods were not safe as they involved the transfer of genes, often between unrelated species that mutate into destructive organisms.
She said, ‘The question we want to ask is if they are natural, why do we have patent rights over them? Why do some people claim ownership over them?
“So you are taking genes from bacteria and inserting them into beans, how is that natural? That is a distortion of natural order, even with pollination or mutation, we don’t have that sort of movement across species.
”Nigeria does not need GMOs to solve the problem of food insecurity. We need to check the core factors bringing about food insecurity.
“Number one is poverty, lack of adequate support for small and medium-scale farmers, these are the things that our government should be addressing instead of bringing in GMOs.
”Our call is for the Nigerian government and other African governments to ban GMOs. It’s important, it’s critical to recognise the unique characteristics of our agricultural landscape and to adopt an approach that is more sustainable and rooted in local realities.”
For Professor Johnson Ekpere, an Agronomy specialist, the call for the ban of GMOs is expedient and urgent, considering Nigeria’s lack of expertise in Biotechnology management.
Warning that Nigeria is not ready for GMOs at the moment, he advised the government to ensure that the basic tenets of the Cartagena Protocol, which establishes the biosecurity-regulating mechanism, are understood by those implementing biotechnology.
”If the government had the good sense to set up a biotechnology agency, it should have the sense to set up a biosecurity research facility to help them understand the dangers and risks involved.
”Research institutes in Nigeria have a lot of research information in their facilities that can be used to enhance and improve food production, GMOs are not the best choice,” he said.
Highlighting the challenges that South Africa now faced as a result of embracing GMOs, Rutendo Matinyarare, a Zimbabwean anti-GMO advocate said South Africa does not have seeds anymore “because they embraced GMOs, now soils are destroyed, the land is dead because of chemicals and seeds from Monsanto and Syngenta.
”GMO seeds do not reproduce themselves or what you plant initially, you have to continue buying new seeds and you have to be dependent on chemical fertilisers that destroy the soil, kill the nematodes, kill the worms, and the living organisms, which gives you a dead soil.”
Meanwhile, a rural rice farmer, Lovelyn Ejims, asked the government to be wary of the impacts of GMOs on the land, warning that adopting GMOs means forcing poverty and land degradation on farmers.
”GMOs damage soils, affect and kill healthy local species, are too expensive for farmers to afford and require too much chemical for production.
”Instead of fixating on GMO, the government must provide security for farmers, deploy extension workers to guide them and earmark large expanses for farming and rotation,” she advocated.
The Coalition in its call also tasked the government to ensure that the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Council, FCCPC, did more to protect Nigerians from unlabelled GMO products and ensure that biotechnology research was used as a vehicle to develop the nation and not promote private interests.