GMO FOODS: NIGERIA ON TJE WRONG BUS – HOMEF

The Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF) has called on Nigerians, particularly peasant farmers to close ranks to make the country Genetically Modified Organization (GMO), free nation.
Executive Director of HOMEF, Arch. Rev. Nnimmo Bassey gave the charge during a one-day programme on “Promoting Biosafety in Nigeria: Farmers’ Dialogue Food Not Poison,” held penultimate week in Benin City, Edo State.
Arch. Bassey, a reknowed Nigeria Environmentalist, said the farmers’ dialogue was aimed at giving the enabling environment for farmers to farm and exchanges of vital idea sharing.
He told the group of rural farmers, mostly women numbering over 200, that there was need for farmers to be abreast of the current “farming practices and ways for preserving seeds and our overall biodiversity”.
Arch. Bassey disclosed that the meeting was to have dialogue between farmers, provides a platform to diagnose the challenges facing small holder farmers as they struggle daily to meet the food requirements of the population.
“Today, we assure our farmers that you have strong allies in the GMO-Free Nigeria Alliance and that the struggle to ensure that technofixes are not presented as cure-all in our agriculture sector.
“Together we will demand rural infrastructure, storage and processing facilities for farm produce as well as provision of extension officers to share knowledge on agro-ecological methods of agriculture that is in line with our practice developed over the millennia and is not tied to the apron strings of institutions that are patently neocolonial and unpatriotic.”
Nnimmo Bassey, Director of the Ecological Think-Tank of HOMEF, stated further that the “Farmers’ Dialogue: was also aimed at providing platform for examining the quality of seeds available to farmers and the special threats posed by opening of the flood gates to genetically engineered crops into Nigeria.
“We continue to demand for a radical revision of the National Biosafety Management Agency (NEMA) Act 2015 and the installation of a neutral Biosafety Regulatory Agency that is totally different from the extremely pro-GMO one currently in place.
“In fact, today it is hard to distinguished NBMA from National Biotechnology Development Agency (NABDA)- an agency expressly set up to promote GMOs even before any biosafety law was in place in the country”, he noted.
The HOMEF Director, further added that “concerned medical doctors and religious bodies and consumer groups have expressed reservations over the pollution of our seeds and foods. The agencies responsible continue to push on in utter contempt of these concerns.
He concluded by saying that food security is in the hands of small scale farmers noting that small scale or family farmers feed the world.
“The willful rejection of the truth that small-scale farmers feed the world has persisted because accepting the truth would compel policy makers to refocus attention where it matters rather than pumping resources into industrial farming that create ecological and social economic problems and is vastly inefficient when outputs are compared to inputs.
“We say this because small-scale farmer use 30% of arable land and resource and feed 70% of the population while the exact reverse is the case with industrial farming”, he posited.
Some of the topics discussed during the programme includes Biosafety in Nigeria: The Act, Regulation and Food Safety and Concerns for our Africultural systems; Agroecology, Securing farmers’ Income and Agriculatrual productivity in Nigeria (Principles and practice); Challenge to Agriculture in Nigeria; False Solution: The way forward, Role of farmers; Role of government; Resolution/Statement by Farmers: The way forward, Role of Farmers, Role of Government, etc.
Experts including Marian Bassey-Orovwuje, Adeoluwa Olugbenga, Mfoniso, Cadmus, Stephen, Joyce Ebebeinwe, amongst others were speakers at the ‘farmers dialogue’.
There were interactive sessions, debates and questions and answers.

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Kadiri Christopher

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