HOMEF’s Director, Dr. Nnimmo Bassey said this during a One Day Media Training for Media Professionals with the theme: “My Food is African” organized by HOMEF to create awareness as to the hazards in consuming genetically modified foods and the use of pesticides, so that they can in turn sensitize members of the public.

In his welcome address, Dr. Bassey noted that the event’s theme, “My Food is African” highlights the issues that HOMEF is trying to address, regretting that Africa has lost her tongue, taste and culture to colonialism which makes Africans vulnerable.

“The issue I will be addressing is that when we say ‘Our food is African’ that suggests that there is a challenge, if it wasn’t a matter to be debated on, it will not even measure. So, it should be taken as a matter, of course, because many of the food we eat are benefiting, this is why we need to recover.”

“One of the things we have lost is our tongue, our taste and our culture and this makes us very vulnerable and you’ll agree with me that one of the major challenges to our food has got to be colonialism.”

“Sometimes, people don’t like to talk about colonialism saying well that was 1960, we’ve gotten to the present, why drag us back, is 63 years not enough for us to forget about the past but brothers and sisters, you can’t forget your past, even if it’s a thousand years.”

“What we need to tell ourselves is that we are not just colonized politically, we are colonized economically, we had trashed our soil and our labour. So ‘Our Food is African’ is a very simple, provocative topic it helps us to reconsider. Our tongue has been captured to junk foods and fast food, if they don’t put a lot of flavours, people don’t like it.”

“So, we need to decolonize our agriculture so as to preserve our crop varieties, this means we have to reject anything that erodes our food system including rejection of genetically modified varieties of crops which Nigeria is just approving left, right and center without caring about the implications for human life.”

“We have to promote precautionary principles. It is our duty to demand safe food, support our farmers, reject monoculture and decolonize our food and decolonize our minds.” 

Jackie Ikeotuonye, who is a co-facilitator of the event, said concentrating on ultra-processed foods has made many people abandon their traditional and highly nutritional diets which results to diseases like cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure amongst others.

“People are beginning to move from eating natural foods to packaged foods; in fact, if you go to some of these big malls, it’s as if it’s now a status symbol kind of thing. You see people snapping pictures because they’ve gone to buy junks from some of those malls.”

“Of course, the labour market, technological change are the reasons we see a shift away from traditional and highly nutritional diets to those vegetable oils, sweeteners and revived carbohydrate and animal sourced food, and what is the result? The result is that we have food that is out of sync with our system.”

“Consuming lots of this food has been linked to increased risk of a wild variety of health problems that can lead to an early grave, obesity, high blood pressure, cancer and a whole lot of them”.

The event which was held in Port Harcourt had journalists from various media organizations as participants.