Professor Qrisstuberg Amua is the Vice-Chancellor of the Benue State University of Agriculture, Science and Technology. Amua, who is also the Executive Director of the Centre for Food Safety and Agricultural Research, CEFSAR.
In this monitored interview on TV, he debunks the argument that Nigeria may not survive on rural agriculture.
He also spoke on the effects of genetically modified organisms, GMOs, to Nigeria and its people. Excerpts:
By Dickson Omobola
How do you feel about Director General of the National Biosafety Management Agency, NBMA, Dr Yemisi Asagbra’s statement that Nigeria may not survive mainly on the rural kind of agriculture and that we need GMOs?
It is shameful. Shameful in the sense that that is not the truth. For a national officer of Dr Yemisi’s standards, who is well-respected, I expected nothing but the truth. Here is the DG of NBMA, the regulator, openly advertising seeds, proprietary material of foreign companies. It is not a statement of fact that we cannot survive without GMO seeds. Like I have alluded in the past, I come from Benue State, where a lot of food is produced. This earned the state Food Basket of the Nation toga. Right now, as I speak with you, a lot of fruits are wasting in Benue State, and they are not GMOs.
Oranges, mangoes, tomatoes, vegetables. Now, to sell the narrative to Nigerians and the people of Africa, that we cannot do without proprietary seeds from Monsanto, or Bayer, or Syngenta is uncharitable to say the least. There are good agronomic practices that have been jettisoned in this country. We, from academia, have trained people, and we have curricula that express these good agronomic practices. For example, if you drop a GMO seed here, it won’t grow, because you do not follow the good agronomic practices that will encourage its growth. Now, to say that our population is so large, is to undermine the fact that even right now in this country, food insecurity, as it is being generally touted, is not all about known or insufficient production of food, it is also about economic deprivation.
There are no sufficient technologies to preserve; so, we experience enormous post-harvest losses, food that would have been preserved for future consumption. So it is not the truth. GMOs are a market strategy, a commercial strategy to erode national sovereignty of countries supposedly independent. For example, when you submit your food sovereignty on the altar of so-called food security or food insecurity, to some proprietary seeds.
The DG talked about grains, saying that we cannot continue to plant grains. I mean, who sold us that narrative? Is it science? What is the difference between grain and seed? Is it not just about sorting and some germination preservation? If we insist on shoving these narratives down the throat of Nigeria’s innocent and ignorant, we are invariably positioning our country to sink, and when we realise it will be too late. Nigeria has very large arable land.
Nigeria has a very agile, youthful population. As a scholar, as a teacher, I also know that I have a responsibility to train young people to modernise agriculture, such that it would attract this median population of 19-year-olds that we have surplus in Nigeria to drop them back into agriculture. I also know that the political actors have a responsibility to secure the country such that the ungoverned species that ought to have been converted to agricultural production would be safe for people like us to go in and produce food. Fly over Nigeria today, you would see that there is so much uncultivated land.
Are you worried that the defence for GMOs is coming at an institutional level?
I am very worried. It smacks of institutional capture. And the companies that are behind this are in the media. These companies have a reputation of institutional capture through bribery. I am worried. I am not insinuating, but expressing my worry.
Producing the seeds in Nigeria
She said that they ensure that those who bring in those seeds must ensure that the seeds are produced here in Nigeria, but under whose patent? Who owns the patent of those seeds? Who owns or controls these companies, so-called national companies that are presenting those seeds for registration? The technology that can spread the production and patenting of these seeds is not owned by us.
It is a very clear case that no single Nigerian company has the patent, indigenously, that is producing the seeds. Second, the Seed Council of Nigeria is also populated by such people who have submitted themselves to be easily captured by those that are bringing in those seeds.
Should we say no to GMO, or if we want to accommodate GMOs, we have to produce it ourselves?
At this stage, we do not have the capacity. The National Biotechnology Research and Development Agency has equipment in a laboratory in Port Harcourt that for the past 10 years have not even been removed from the box. Nobody to man those laboratories. They have not been trained. So we shift attention from the main theme and go on the trivialities. For now, we do not have the capacity to say no to GMOs. Second, if we are saying let us produce GMOs here, I will not say no. But the question that needs to be answered is why GMOs?
What do you think about regulation? The DG spoke about how they are working to begin labelling GMO crops in Nigeria. How effective can that be?
How effective can that ever be? How will the woman selling bean cake on the street know that the beans used for the production of the bean cake is GMO to avail the consumer the option of choice? It is impracticable for the Nigerian context. Our agriculture employs the highest number of people. By the time you promote these GMOs and you encourage big food, big agriculture, large-scale farmers, you are invariably putting more smallholder farmers out of business. So the labelling issue is impracticable, and this is within the purview of the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission. They need to wade into this.
Also, Nigerians do not have a choice. They just consume what is available. You will observe that there is a principle that is at play here. Make the Nigerian people very hungry, and present whatever. How do they do this? Bandits attack somewhere. People are put into internally displaced people, IDP, camps. They are hungry, and you bring food to them.
Whether they see that the grains you are supplying them in the IDP camps are coming from Ukraine or from Yugoslavia or whatever country, because they are already hungry and desperate, they will accept it. Labelling is impracticable.
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