The Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Chief Audu Ogbeh, recently said that the government would soon launch a new National Pesticide Policy to regulate indiscriminate use of chemicals in the preservation of farm produce in the country. The minister also said a policy on food management would soon be introduced on the grounds that cases of self-poisoning had been on the rise largely because people lack relevant knowledge on the best ways to preserve food.
This was the government’s response to the revelation that beans traders use sniper pesticide to preserve the product for sale. The Nigeria Agricultural quarantine Service (NAQS) in shock pointed out that sniper is too toxic for human consumption and said that it is alarming that a notoriously lethal substance is becoming a pesticide of choice for storage of beans in Nigeria. The service co-coordinating Director, Dr Vincent Isegbe, in a statement said “the substance in question is an organophosphate called DDVP (2, 2-dichloroxinyl dimethyl Phosphate) which is dangerous to health. If sniper is applied as a pesticide in beans, it becomes a material equivalent of death in pot. Nigerians eat a lot of beans, so it may not be an exaggeration to say that sniper in beans is a weapon of mass destruction.’’
The proposed 29-page policy on pesticide being prepared by the quarantine service is also considering a recommendation for the use of biodegradable pesticide against chemical types for food preservation. The World Safety Organisation (WSO) says sniper is a poisonous pesticide that can kill instantly, and not supposed to be sprayed on food as it can cause respiratory paralyses, kidney disease and death.
While Nigerians are raising alarm over the use of sniper no one seems to bother about the effect of the use of herbicides, the chemicals used by farmers to combat weed infestation which has a tendency of reducing crop output. These chemicals are equally used to kill weeds in residential areas, factories and non-agricultural areas, Glyphosate-based herbicides such as Roundup, Touchdown, Turbo, Weedal and Weedsate, among others, are used by our beans farmers to clear their farms of weed before planting. But in August this year, the government of Vietnam demanded the U.S. agro chemical giant, Monsanto, to pay compensation to the victims of Agent Orange, which the company supplied the U.S. military during the Vietnam war from 1961-1971. Agent Orange was a chemical herbicide and defoliant used by the US military to deprive Vietcong Guerilla fighters of food and concealment. Dioxin, a highly toxic element of Agent Orange has been linked to major health problems such as birth defects, cancers and other deadly diseases. This demand by Vietnam came in response to the firm being ordered to pay $289m to a school groundkeeper who claims his use of its Roundup weed killer contributed to his terminal cancer.
According to the Francisco jury’s verdict, Monsanto, founded in St. Louis, Missouri in 1901 and acquired by Bayer AG in 2018, knew or at least should have known the harmful use of glyphosate- based herbicides that completely refute the US statements about the safety of their products. The Vietnamese initiative received broad public support within the country and contributed to strengthening its international image. Even the World Health Organisation International Agency for Research on cancer has declared glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic”. Yet our beans farmers ignorantly still use the chemicals containing cancer- causing ingredients to clear their farms before planting.
Despite the court’s decision in the midst of several hundreds of lawsuits claiming Roundup causes cancer, and others have been given the green light to proceed to trial, Misanto, supported by the State Department and Pro-American NGOs continue to aggressively promote, on the African market, especially Nigeria in particular, its genetically modified products including herbicides.
In fact, Mosanto seems determined to take over agriculture production all over the world and enslave all farmers and countries to their reportedly commercial blood-sucking logic. The company has entered Nigeria through the National Biotechnology Development Agency which has been allegedly compromised by the company to provide it an entry point to take over Nigeria’s agriculture. The National Biosafety Management Agency (NMBA) is literally selling Nigeria’s future for temporary inducement by allowing Mosanto Agriculture Nigeria Ltd to be registered in Nigeria and start production without the explicit approval of the Federal Executive Council and the National Assembly.
The Company’s first project in Nigeria was to grow glyphosate-infused maize despite recent studies that link glyphosate to health defects such as degeneration of the liver and kidney and Hodgkin Lymphoma. Mosanto has equally been allowed to initiate so called experimental farms to produce cotton, vegetable, sorghum, soya beans and wheat.
About 19 European Union states have banned genetically modified crops. Mosanto crops, according to experts, are genetically modified to tolerate the use of its glyphosate containing herbicides. Researchers have discovered that Nigeria’s food crops are loaded with deeply poisons high levels of chemicals like dichlonous, diometrate, and tichlorphon. Some were used in the planting process, others in preservation. The poisonous chemicals reportedly did not serve their purpose because microbes such as Salmonella, aflatoxins and mould had contaminated the food.
The E.U. research on Nigeria food discovered items from Nigeria contained glass fragment, rodent, excreta and dead insects. In 2015 and 2016, the European Union declared that 42 food items exported from Nigeria were not fit for human consumption. There were beans, melon seeds, bitter leaf, palm-oil, pumpkins, live snails, shelled groundnuts and moi-moi wrapped in cellophane. They did not meet basic food hygiene tests in planting, growth and transportation. Beyond the sniper-beans scandal, the Federal Government must implement laws and policies that would not approve genetically modified crops for planting in Nigeria given the dangers of this technology.
Yerima wrote in from Kaduna
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